Mise en Scènes. Video and Performance

— With a presentation by Manuel Palacio, curator of The Sublime Image. Video Art in Spain (1970–1987) and a lecturer in Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at the University Carlos III (Madrid), alongside Carlota Álvarez Basso, head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Audiovisual Works from 1992 to 1999, and Chema González, head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Film and New Media Department.  

A programme on the origins of video linked to happenings, performance and Action Art; in other words, connected to life itself. Primera Muerte (First Death) is the first video art piece made in Spain, a work which disappeared for decades before being finally recovered by curators Imma Prieto and Blanca de la Torre in 2010. After the Barcelona College of Architects asked a group of avant-garde artists made up of Sílvia Gubern, Jordi Galí, Àngel Jové and Antoni Llena to give a lecture, the group decided to record everyday scenes of them living together and subsequently showed them during the lecture on a TV monitor while Àngel Jové read extracts of William S. Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch and the audience was recorded and confronted with their own images while The Beatles’ song “Let It Be” played. Meanwhile, in Subsensorial Actions 1 by Muntadas, the artist, with his eyes covered, experiments with meanings alluding to somatic actions recalling Vito Acconci and Lygia Clark, as well as the existential absurdism of Buster Keaton.

A programme threaded together by the mise en scène, the masquerade, the costume, pastiche and aesthetic saturation. Regina Álvarez, in a pioneering and little-known exercise in the female gaze, studies, via the pose, the construction of femininity in canonical cinema. Antonio Cano and Pedro Garhel, for their part, film a performance for camera developed at ARCO 1985, whereby Garhel and Rosa Galindo dance around post-minimalist sculptures with loud colours. José Ramón Da Cruz develops a psychodrama laden with aestheticism between a dancer and a person with reduced mobility. Finally, El Hortelano, an iconic painter from Madrid’s Movida movement, makes in Koloroa an impossible news bulletin, which, in topsy-turvy Spanish, he presents with Ouka Leele and artists from the time like Ceesepe, Nazario and Jaume Sisa. A method that would inspire Almodóvar in Kika (1993).

The third session gathers youth music subcultures from the mid-1980s, a vibrant time for music video language, exploring how music, partying and night-life encapsulate a profound desire for total change, reflected in the formal experiments of the works here. The Basque radical rock of La Polla Records (Juan José Narbona with Txus), Hertzainak (Josu Zabala with Mata a tu viejo) and Kortatu (Tipula Beltza with Sarri, Sarri) with latent terrorist conflict (Ramón de Vargas with Canciones vascas), mixed with the telluric, histrionic Galician punk of Os Resentidos and Antón Reixa in Abdul, a music video with scenography by artists Menchu Lamas and Antón Patiño, and Alicia en Galicia Caníbal, a music video of Galician identity seen through the lens of counterculture via the track “Galicia cannibal”. The session concludes with Andalusian folklore in the witty, night-time style of Círculo Vicioso in Temperamento cañí.

— With a presentation and talk by Julián Álvarez 

How does video’s new gaze recognise space in its different dimensions? Batlàntic puts forward a tangible representation of financial abstraction in contemplating on the glass architecture of a multinational bank a superimposed formula to calculate value. Fàbriques is a fascinating example of urban architecture, a drift through the factories of the Barcelona area of Poblenou before it underwent radical gentrification. As if in an exercise by Georges Perece, describing the same square over and over, Línia 39 puts forward a videographic panorama to exhaust the gaze in one place: twenty-four hours in the plaza de Rovira i Trias in Barcelona. Moreover, in Indian Circle Eugènia Balcells approaches a similar exercise to early Chantal Akerman in turning the camera into a mechanical eye of domestic intimacy, in stills of life that occur between unalterable movements of the camera.

Video-Nou (1977–1979) was a Barcelona collective that used video as a medium for criticism, participation and social intervention during the Transition to democracy in Spain, their work committed to horizontal communication and the collective production of videos with communities. The practice of the collective — made up of Carles Ameller, Genís Cano, Albert Estival, Xefo Guasch, Marga Latorre, Pau Maragall, Lluïsa Ortínez, Lluïsa Roca and Joan Úbeda — made video a popular tool with which to recognise, through collective voices, dissipated authorships and natural performers, the nascent society at the time. This session presents a compilation of the collective’s best works, from neighbourhood life and street assemblies to developmentalism in Barcelona, its environmental consequences and the new political landscape. A fresco of 1970s Spain.

The sixth session is a return to video’s narrative dimension at its most cinematic, while also incorporating, with maturity, the traits of the medium — collage, the rupture of a film grammar and the nature of recording lived experience — through the screening of two cult medium-length films. In Pornada (a wordplay with “porn” and “working day”) the inhabitants of an unusual Castilian town labour to get a telephone service as they dig their own grave in a local cemetery for entertainment; Hispanic Surrealism, a reflection on Spain’s rural exodus and humour along the lines of José Luis Cuerda are concentrated in this unique video by Javier Codesal, a milestone in the medium. The work of Manuel Abad, meanwhile, is a tragic and melancholy meditation on suicide in Galicia using the aesthetics of collage that is characteristic of video.

— With a presentation and talk by Manel Muntaner 

The film series closes with a dystopian vision of the 1980s, a piece which is regarded as a cult work in Spanish video and hitherto one of the most forgotten. In Especial 84, Manel Muntaner intermingles key passages from George Orwell’s 1984 with contemporary images of surveillance, domination, violence, resistance and subjugation. The video recalls the dark side of the 1980s, a time of neo-conservative shifting in international politics and the AIDS pandemic, by way of a carefully chosen selection of fictional extracts and real news, apocalyptically narrated with a voiceover that seems to turn Orwell’s warning into an urgent prophecy.