Activities

In recent years, it has been pointed out that one of the identifying features of Spanish alternative film is the exploration of the real.

This summer film series explores one of the contemporary cinematographies that, although very interesting, is among the least distributed in Europe. Midway between new auteur voices and the poetics of documentary, this series shows how film responds to a situation of provisionality and how it imagines the future from the vantage point of uncertainty.

Adolescents. Films and Videos for/about Girls and Boys is a programme of underground films that deal with the problems faced by adolescents and the challenges entailed in reaching the earliest years of adult life. Despite the difficulties involved in this vital phase for most people who experience it, as series curator Susana Blas notes, “we have gone from thinking of youth as an illness that is quickly cured to completely sublimating it. It seems that nobody wants to let go of this young way of living, which for many people has become a way of feeling, from being radical to just adopting their aesthetics and fashions. Today, you can find 40-year-old adolescents.” Drawing on this observation, the series is designed to break with the most perverse aspects involved in the sublimation of adolescence and unearth some of the clichés that have emerged around this difficult and venerated time of life. At the same time, it is introducing audiences to the work of a series of essential artists in the contemporary audiovisual world.

The Critical Practices Seminar aims to nurture students’ capacity for critical judgement and encourage the adoption of a standpoint through the profound knowledge of currents of contemporary thought. The seminar is structured around the reading and analysis of documents and materials submitted by each of the participating professors.

Although they span the area between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, the film and audiovisual activities of José Val del Omar have taken place in the territory of myth. Myth as something situated outside of history, that only leads to cult status.

The friction of bodies is a film and video series that presents a broad panorama of different artistic and political manifestations from the 1980s, which arose during and co-existed with the years of repression in Latin America. Many of these videos and films, most of which have never been shown publicly outside of their original contexts, demonstrate the emergency of new political subjects and forms of subcultural participation. The program also includes recent film proposals that look back at the agitated times of the 1980s in this context, to offer different readings or to activate a memory still throbbing within us.

Films from documenta X is a film and video programme that features a unique event in the history of the festival held in Kassel every five years: the creation of its own audiovisual programme, consisting of a group of fiction films and documentaries conceived and created at the behest of the documenta festival. This date on the art calendar has a long history, going back to 1955 when Arnold Bode, the exhibition founder, used the so-called Bode Plan to express his desire to present “foreign and national films in Kassel”. Accordingly, the first documenta featured 40 Years of Film Documents, while the series Happenings and Fluxus accompanied documenta 5. In addition to a selection of videos and an experimental film series, documenta 6 featured Cinema of the 1970s, and Parsifal (1982) by Hans Jürgen Syberberg (Nossendorf, 1935) was screened at the opening session of documenta 7. Finally, the film sequence Jazz-Boxing-Baseball formed part of documenta 9.

This film and video series presents an overview of the film work of the North American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (New York, 1943-1978), an oeuvre that was largely forgotten for a long period of time. Beginning early in the 1970s until his death in 1978, Matta-Clark was one of the main driving forces on the New York SoHo art scene, characterised by his experiments aimed at breaking the limits that define an artwork, altering the structures established in the art world and exploding numerous means of artistic expression.