Indian Circle

Eugènia Balcells earned her place in the mid-1970s as a pioneer of experimental cinema and video art in Spain. Having studied technical architecture in Barcelona and visual arts at the University of Iowa, she created her work between New York and Barcelona. Her installations and videos, which are critical and sociological in nature, examine mass culture and how the media shape everyday experience, modulating perception, attention habits and the ways in which we relate to our visual and auditory environment. Indian Circle records an improvisational exercise between the musical action of Peter Van Riper (her collaborator in the 1980s) and the video camera in a single shot, in real time. Sound and image interact, blurring the boundaries between action, volume and rhythm, while embarking on an audiovisual experience where each element redefines the others, in a reflection on the complex relationship between time, movement and sound. The film won the Grand Prix at Montbéliard’s 1ère Manifestation Internationale de Vidéo in 1982.