El Gesto en el Momento
(The Gesture In The Moment)
Short Films from Colombia
Co-Presented with Consulate General of Colombia
Curator Camilo Gonzalez in attendance
Friday, June 3, 8PM Screening (Music at 7:30PM)
Location: Discovery Green Park, 1500 McKinney
FREE
Aurora Picture Show and the General Consulate of Colombia join forces to showcase a rare selection of works from some of the leading and emerging talents of contemporary Colombian experimental video. “El Gesto en el Momento (The Gesture in the Moment),” a special selection of short films from Colombian filmmaking, will screen at Discovery Green Park, located at 1500 McKinney. This free outdoor screening will kick-off with a musical performance by the Colombian jazz band, The Erick Jaimes Quartet at 7:30PM, with films starting at dark.
“El Gesto en el Momento” will illuminate some of the artist-made films from Colombian filmmakers who are part of a cinema boom due to the support from the government to back film and video production. The films in this program will highlight powerful metaphors, surreal landscapes, and evocative images from filmmakers challenging concepts of traditional cinema. The animated film, Lighthearted, which uses light-painting technique, also has ties to Texas as a graduate thesis project from filmmaker Felipe Ruiz at the University of Texas at Dallas. Other artists featured in this eclectic compilation include Hugo Marin, Juan Manuel Escobar, Victoria Rivera, Adrian Villa among others.
The Erick Jaimes Quartet is a Colombian jazz band made up of Erick Jaimes (guitar), Daniel Silliman (piano), James Mattice (bass) and Cory Delaney (drums).
Patrons are encouraged to bring lawn chairs and blankets. Picnics are also allowed, but not outside adult beverages or glass bottles. Drinks and food will be available for sale at restaurants located in the park.
Special thanks to Discovery Green Park and the Centro Cultural Colombiano for their support of this program.
About the Curator:
Colombian native Camilo Gonzalez, a digital media artist, as well as Aurora’s own Media Arts Instructor is the curator for “El Gesto en el Momento”. He received his BFA from the University of Houston and his multimedia work has been shown in screenings and exhibitions including Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Lawndale Art Center, DiverseWorks Art Space, Blaffer Gallery and Box 13, among others.
The program will include the following films:
Teoría del Color (Theory of color / 2011)
by Hugo Marin
2011 (3 min)
Theory of color addresses failure as a fundamental historical condition. Its audio is composed with sound files from the World Trade Center attacks and recordings of Pruit Igoe’s implosion, both projects from Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki. These events constitute key events on the reflection over the historical contemporaneity of humanity, where history has been built out of failures.
Dist-Ansiando
by Diana Menestrey Schwieger
2009 (08:16 min)
A line unwraps, builds and dissolves situations about two opposites sides.
Two extremes, two edges, two knots, a here and a there.
The Rare Circumstances of an Inertia That Distances What I do From What I Could Have Done
by Adrián Villa and Benjamín Ramírez
2010 (4 min)
Structures inflict a powerful seduction. They easily captivate sight and mind. But at the same time something makes people doubt about them. Suspicion and skepticism sometimes win over the blunt conception and subsequent praise most constructing acts fall into. Common condemn to that strange emptiness that lies behind the idea of a pastime or a hobby is an example of such resistances. Nevertheless, from a broad perspective, aren’t all constructions a way of modulating time, of letting it go by?
Jugando Solitario
by Colectivo Individual
2010
Experimental video clip that describes the relationship between man and technology, violence hidden in a click, the progressive loneliness and the isolation from reality.
La vida, Los Objetos
by Anibal Maldonado
2009 (5:45 min)
Objects can interact with things that concern us and oppress us, something we carry in our minds every morning, the weight of our lives, our own difficulties, our conditions, our unbearable and desirable movement, the secrets, the desire. What if the hair dryer it overheats while you manage to get to work? What if the vacuum cleaner broke and instead of swallowing dust it began to spit it? What would happen when the power goes out, when lightning strikes and burns your computer? "When you have a virus? When the phone is not in tone? When the blender is damaged?
Retrato de una Familia
by Victoria Rivera
2010 (8 min)
Antonio Soto is 12 years old; he lives in a small rural town in Colombia. Today is his father’s funeral. Left with the responsibility to care for a broken family, he must step up and carry out his father’s last request; to be buried in the suit that has been passed on through generations of Soto men.
Underwater Lullaby
by Andrés Jurado & Laura Josephine Snyder
2011 (3:54 min)
A foot fetishism footage surrounded by sound and water.
UNEHIMLICH (Animation)
by Juan Manuel Escobar
2007 (3 min)
Experimental short film where the character gets involved in a really sinister and anguish situations. Unheimlich, wakes anguish feelings in the spectator and the doubt if what they are seeing might be possible in real life.
ACSD – Mar de Dirac (ACDS – Dirac’s sea / 2009)
by Hugo Marin
2009, (4 min)
Analysis and composition of a diffuse system was born out of my interest for image and language, especially in the way they conjugate. In this work language, more than making a cross cut over the image, in an effort to explain it, must maintain parallel, thus preserving composite limits. I have thought about this in a similar way as to how Spinoza explained the relation between soul and body. I believe such should be the equidistance towards the image. The reference to language in its impossibility of silencing and yet saying is emptied, like in the game of emptying and filling, in which the identity of being is not given by filling, where the being is not what has been filled or emptied but rather both things at once.
Amor y Odio
by Colectivo Individual
2004
Experimental video clip that takes ownership over the image of one of the most important TV shows in Latin America such as "El Chavo del Ocho". The scene shows the characters of the series making music with unconventional objects, synchronized with electronic music created by the colectivo individual.
Lighthearted
by Felipe Ruiz
2011 (2:54 min)
Lighthearted was realized as part of a graduation thesis project at the University of Texas at Dallas. It was completed in December of 2010. The film takes light-painting techniques combined with animation storytelling to narrate the character's tale and his search companionship.
About the Colombian artists:
Diana Menestrey Schwieger graduated in 2009 from the fine arts program of the National University of Colombia in Bogotá. She developed her first animation piece Dist-Ansiando during 2008 as her thesis film while participating in the exchange program with KHM (Academy of Media Arts) in Cologne, Germany. Her work illustrates complex human internal struggles, its contradictions and reinterpretations, through the use of minimalistic imagery.
Producciones Invisibles was conformed by Adrián Villa and Carolina Pinzón in 2004. They have mainly realized in situ interventions and video installations that reflect on the limits and contingences between space and being, place and individual, inhabiting and building. They are interested in art as a platform for encounter that enables contexts to be transformed.
Anibal Maldonado is an artist from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia with an MA in Visual Arts from the same university where he obtained a scholarship as outstanding graduate student. He has served as teaching assistant in the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and as a teacher in the area of Basic Design in the Faculty of Architecture and Interior Design from the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogota, Colombia. He is the coordinator of the research-creation " Coello and Combeima, Research and experimentation in the Tolima melodic territories" of the Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia and is part of the research group "Actos de Voz" of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, an interdisciplinary research group of sound in the arts. As an artist, he is currently exploring various possibilities of drawing, sound and moving image (video, animation, objects, installations, performance) as a result of his graduate studies.
Andrés Jurado & Laura Josephine Snyder. A Colombian Visual Artist, he is a Professor in the Pontificia Universidad Javariana and he is currently studying a Masters program in UNAM in Mexico City. His work has been exhibited in Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Europe. He is currently working on a variety of experimental projects. Laura Snyder has a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently studying a Masters program in UNAM in Mexico City.
Victoria Rivera, raised in Bogotá, Colombia, has written, directed and produced five short films of her own while attending School of Visual Arts in New York, where she just completed her BFA in Film. She is a New York based filmmaker interested in independant film and Documentary.
Juan Manuel Escobar has made several videos and participated in different festivals. He was invited participate in the Filmminute Film Festival in London for his short film ME- 目. His short films have been featured in different countries like England, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Mexico and Cuba. His shortfilm Unheimlich, was presented last year at the prestigious Tate Modern in London, within the festival No Soul for Sale, after being selected by the “ Sin lugar a Dudas” Festival to represent Colombia and it was outlined as one of the 6 best Internet short films by the The Guardian of London, in August 2008. His work has also participated in Videopolis 2010 in Barcelona, the Festival of Cine Pobre in Cuba and the International Film and TV festival in Cartagena, among others. He is currently working on the promotional video clip for the Colombian band Dante, as part of their debut album, recorded with the well-known Sylvia Massy, producer of big bands like TOOL, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Smashing Pumpkins among others. He also made the music video for the new Artist Riva, who will be launching her first single, of her debut album in the next days, and now he is in the preproduction of the music video, for the first single of the new album, of the Colombian band Sexy Lucy.
Colectivo Individual is an art collective composed of visual artist Federico Daza and graphic designer Sebastian Daza, the experimental electronic group was formed in 2001 with the idea of creating automatic music that triggers audiovisual and plastic intent. The collective individual has performed in public spaces such as auditoriums and art galleries. Their proposal is an interactive audiovisual live performance directly involving the audience, in addition to mono channel of appropriations of popular images in motion.
Felipe Ruiz is a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Dallas. Although born in Denmark, Felipe grew up in Bogota, Colombia and moved to the States in 1998. As a student, he completed multiple short animated films that have received recognition in the United States. Felipe's films have been showcased in the 2010 ASIFA-Hollywood Student Animation Festival, 2009 MidWest Three-Minute Film Festival. 2009 ABOSG Student Animation Competition, Cosmic Film Festival and the 2004 Rio Grande Animation Festival. He currently works in Los Angeles, California.
Hugo Marín is a Colombian artist currently working in Bogotá - Colombia as an audiovisual creator. In his early works he already showed an intense focus on the complex relations between images, concepts and words which ever since he has been enriching and extending. Grasping on the vastness of these questions from the grounds of time-based media, especially digital video, he has made his own path towards the image problem and its connotative intelligibility as perceived from the phenomenon of thought understood as a discourse construction submerged in time. In this same sense, his inclination and close relation to the world of the digital has enabled a close encounter with new possibilities of thought, rather abstract and posed on a broad understanding of the virtual.
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