SESSION 94, ILLEGAL_CINEMA

Screening proposed by Julia Martos, followed by discussion.

With Un’Ora Sola ti Vorrei (Alina Marazzi, 2002) I became aware of a tide of daughters searching for their mothers. As a sort of historical justice, something you would expect and which will have to happen one way or another, there exists a third generation of observers, whose gaze has not only shifted from the home towards the world but also sees the world through the domestic archive (Nina Fonoroff, for instance; or Shanti Thakur, Lise Yasui, Sandhya Suri, Pilar Monsell, Agustina Comedi, Carolina Astudillo, Marga Almirall, Emma Tusell and others). This generation of filmmakers make use of home cinema – normally recorded by the head of the family – to inscribe their own version of history.

Alina is searching for her disappeared mother in home movies filmed by her grandfather, and her mother’s hidden letters. The story she unearths is also a story of patriarchal visuality, where the happy scenes her mother was portrayed in belong, in reality, to a disciplined social and family context which led her to depression. By assembling her mother’s diaries, letters and records, that is, through a “found” subjectivity, Alina brings to light a silenced testimony and reestablishes her own relationship with her mother, or with the image of her, at least.

Julia Martos (Cordoba, 1989) is an artist and programmer, who ended her studies in Film Programming and Curating at the Birkbeck University of London in 2021, with a grant from the Fundación Botín for Museum Curatorship and Management. Her thesis, The Hand Behind: a contemporary awakening of women from the Spanish family archive, is evidence of her deep interest in the making of feminist counter-history through appropriationist practices in filmmaking. She has worked as a programmer at Essay Film Festival (London, 2021); at the Archivos Vivos conferences (BilbaoArte, 2021); the Korean Film Nights, KCCUK (London, 2020) and the CCCB Archivo Xcèntric (Barcelona, 2021); and has also assisted in coordinating the Centre for Contemporary Arts CCA-Glasgow during the 2017-2018 season.

This event is supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FFAI), New York.