Concert, sound publication and performance. Esperanza Collado and Rafael Martínez del Pozo*

Presentation of “LEVE: Grabaciones de Campo #02” followed by the performance “We Only Guarantee the Dinosaurs”

“LEVE: Grabaciones de Campo #02”

Grabaciones de Campo #02 presents a collection of sound pieces whose production can be considered as field recordings: the recording of a particular place in a specific time frame. Production of the entire series took place during the second part of 2013 in the natural surroundings of Castro de Cepeda, in both a close geographical radius and the sound studio in the middle of this small rural village in the province of León. Pieces were devised by artists from different fields (mostly film, performance and music): Chus Domínguez, María Valle, Claudio Caldini, Javi Álvarez, Víctor Iriarte, Rouzbeh Rashidi and Alex Reynolds. Rather than being fieldwork which reconstructs the past from an anthropological or ethnographic viewpoint, this set of works records sound situations created by the participants themselves but bound to the specificity of the place and time.

LEVE is an art association which was set up in 2010 and aims to create a space for production, encounters and exchanges in a rural setting. It is based in La Cepeda, a rural area in the province of León, and it hosts activities founded on collaboration, research and dialogue.

“We Only Guarantee the Dinosaurs”. Esperanza Collado

From a territory which owes its history to the link between film, sculpture and dance, the conditions of enunciation of the film image are transformed. Film’s luminous resonance occupies a space, and has the potential to make it a tactile, magnetic, volatile, gaseous geometry where projection consists not only in forming enlarged optical images of a film, but also in invoking thought processes (conceiving, proposing, suggesting) and physical bodily actions (throwing towards, setting up, tracing).

Esperanza Collado works between installation and performance, throwing the film medium and its conditions of presentation into crisis. To do so, she explores the instability of the act of projecting, and does small choreographies about the syntax of film. Her 16mm films are conceived for performative contexts. She is the author of Paracinema: la Desmaterialización del Cine en las Prácticas Artísticas (Escritos Sobre Arte, VII Prize, Fundación Arte y Derecho / Trama Editorial, Madrid 2012) and co-founded the LEVE art association and the Experimental Film Club, a film exhibition space in Dublin where she has been programming regularly since 2008. She has curated exhibitions and film programs in independent spaces and institutions in Ireland, England and Spain. Her work has been widely shown, and she has been working with Irish filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain as Operation Rewrite since 2011. She studied Fine Arts and a PhD at Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, where she currently teaches, combining this with a Masters in Performing Arts Practices and Visual Culture, Artea/UCLM.

*This event is a collaboration with “Paracinema”, a program organised by Tabakalera (San Sebastián) around the work of artist Esperanza Collado. “Paracinema” will take place on 23, 24 and 25 June at Tabakalera, and on 27 and 28 June at Bulegoa z/b. The program looks at the concept developed by Esperanza Collado in her book Paracinema: La Desmaterialización del Cine en las Prácticas Artísticas, which was awarded the “Escritos sobre Arte” prize, Fundación Arte y Derecho (Madrid). It opens on Monday 23 June at Tabakalera with an exhibition on ideas related to the concept, and a look at Esperanza Collado’s work in the context of her line of investigation. The program will be rounded up with a talk and a performance. Isabel de Naverán and Leire Vergarga’s talk Los tiempos del montaje III, on Tuesday 24 June, was proposed for this context: art work that takes film back to its origin, that is, to the concatenation of thought and mechanisms of association, allowing the film medium to be expressed in its purest potency, in non-filmic works. Operation Rewrite, a collaborative project between Collado and Irish filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain which began in 2011, will present a new performance, A Piece of Broken Mirror Suspended on a String, on Wednesday 25 June. The piece takes Maya Deren and Marcel Duchamp’s Witches Cradle as its starting point.