ILLEGAL_CINEMA, SESSION 90. SEASON OPENS WITH NEW COORDINATORS

Screening of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939, 01:39) y Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948, 02:13). Session proposed by Aizpea de Atxa y Akane Saraiva, the new coordinators of Illegal_Cinema.

I know I’ll be typing really slowly, erasing long before I start writing, because I think it’s hard to write before I know what will happen. I think that when all this is over it’ll be clearer.

It wasn’t easy to find audiovisual material we could find ourselves together in. We felt closer to different images, but we couldn’t see ourselves together in them. So we thought we’d revise films we weren’t that fond of, but that both of us had seen on TV. The background to our childhoods, constructed by ETB2. A background chosen by our aitites, which we didn’t have the time or interest to immerse ourselves in, but which was there nevertheless. The westerns we watched while we were playing, sitting on the ground drawing, or waiting for the programme to change.

All those images got into our heads and hid somewhere in our minds. All of that is really generational, but why not? We were really little then, and in some way, that’s the relationship we have with it.

There were hours when that was the only thing on the screen. Westerns on ETB2. We wondered if outside Euskal Herria westerns were also shown on TV. And now we’d like to revise those images, which have somehow always been in the background.

We remembered John Wayne, and that became an excuse to choose our films. Then he faded away and it became a desert.

Aizpea de Atxa (Iruña, 1998), Akane Saraiva (Galdames, 1997). We met during the first year of our art degree at UPV/EHU (University of the Basque Country) and have been close to each other since, accompanying one another. That means we understand each other’s way of working. Both of us lean towards the audiovisual, and although we often have the same opinions, each of us has her own way of doing things and understanding. Together, we work from-in the distance between us. From the space that happens between each of us, to come to something we’d never do or achieve alone, but can together. There’s also a 180 km/2 hr/city bus, coach and intercity bus between us. That influences the way we communicate and share: mainly physical, reduced to online with digital intermediaries and/or prolonged in time by the measurements of analogical space.