Explora

A Demonstration is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of early modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which scientific truths were discovered through visual analogy.

Shot in the Andes, Aggregate States of Matters deals with the increasing impact of climate change on remote areas. At its core, the film pivots on the ambivalent negotiation between the binary idea of nature and culture, oscillating within the contemporary discourse on the environment and its complex layers based on scientific, philosophical, spiritual and cultural approaches. The work shows the blurring boundaries between human and non-human actors within communities affected by glacier melting in the Andes. From an extensive dialogue with the local people, Barba draws a critical picture of a world where progress has stopped making sense.

During the production of Thorax I had the historical work Anémic Cinéma by Marcel Duchamp in mind, this avant-garde film classic from 1926. ‘Anemic cinema’ refers directly to the machine, the bloodless apparatus behind the cinematic space of illusion. Thorax brings the organism back into projection.

The cinema is a machine. Kopierwerk testifies to that, lets itself be carried by industrial rhythms, and in doing so, negotiates the analogue era, whose end meant also new beginnings, creative deviations: as complement to digital mass culture, taking place before our eyes is a movement largely freed from the pressure to generate a profit, a niche revolution of sorts in analogue media.

‘Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying fact to be in and to have to live with.’

En A Radical Film, Canapa experimenta con finas chouchas de ravo negro sobre película virxe, unha referencia ás raíces do cine. Further Radical utiliza o mesmo material levado ao seu extremo lóxico nunha impresora óptica. Unha auténtica explosión de luz atravesa a escura emulsión fotoquímica.