OTRO MUNDO (MÁS ATERRADOR) ES POSIBLE

There are other possible worlds, and they are all in this one, but some of them are quite frightening. Wars, astronauts that disappear from history, jets of murderous blood and Martian invasions through music videos. From the hallucinogenic, terrifying film of Austrian Peter Tscherkassky to the interspatial antics of Lluís Escartín, and including the political-apocalyptic denunciation of Jean-Gabriel Périot, this session, without departing from found footage cinema, proposes a survey of the most terrifying science fiction: the kind that emerges from reality, from the everyday, from the nearby. Or from film itself. The celluloid as a source of infinite terror, the political reality as a perverse reflection of a rotten world, experimental film as the pathway to absolute panic. Now that’s truly scary. And it’s free of charge.

Jean-Gabriel Périot. It is possible to make films with images captured on the Internet. It is possible to rescue images from the immense tide, from the audiovisual whirlpool, and give them back their identity, or give them a new one. Through Google, Périot constructs a militant, fascinating work, both political and madcap, innovative and tremendously contemporary, capable of reviving something as old as the spectator’s viewpoint subjected to a manipulating torrent, to an iconic high-voltage discharge.

Peter Tscherkassky. The filmmaker as craftsman, the photography lab as a battlefield where the artists engages in direct combat with the photogram. This Austrian filmmaker, who produces one short flm every two years, attacks the minimum unit of the audiovisual, the photogram, to deconstruct the cinematographic language and even put an end to the physical support containing it. His works, veritable explosions of sound and image, are extreme experiences which subject the viewers to new feelings more common to a terrifying world that inhabits the screen.

Lluís Escartín. A Catalan Herzog, traveller and sedentary with an indefatigable curiosity, Escartín does not film, rather he unlearns; he does not teach, rather he questions our position as viewers. Ivan Istochnikov, which seems like a documentary, is actually a fictitious work by a video buff who always films outside of home. Here, too. Made for a photography exhibition featuring Joan Fontcuberta, it narrates the story of a Soviet astronaut who has been erased from history. And it does it so well that Iker Jiménez devoted a real programme to this invented story.

Nicolas Provost. A visual artist, his films combine the grotesque and the emotional, beauty and cruelty, the emotional and the intellectual, the perverse and the everyday. A habitué of art galleries and film festivals, his work draws equally from film and life, but always to (re)create a perverse, disturbing world, everyday yet terrifying. His works, always short, always disturbing, have been screened at festivals like Venice, Sundance and Clermont-Ferrand, among many others.

Kikol Grau. Kikol Grau has been messing with video since he was 16 years old, when he applied to Barcelona TV with a friend with neither studies nor technological knowledge, but with the idea of making a television programme. The programme Por la Kara TV let him experiment with whatever he wanted and to learn whatever he could. PKP was a wild, totally unfettered magazine which left a mark in many of its productions, such as the programmes Gabinete de Crisis (a TV programme you will never see on the TV) made with Arturo Bastón and Félix Pérez-Hita.