Aldo Tambellini Space Is the Place
By Helena Girón y Samuel M. Delgado

From the distance, with the pass of time, everything seemed a mythological story. A confluence of referents that, more than an end, was a starting point. For a long time before our trip, readings and conversations always ended there: New York, 1960. A magical world in which free jazz musicians, experimental filmmakers and plastic artists lived together, all of them creating from the core idea of a radical freedom. The main focus of all this was the Lower East Side, which at that time was one of the popular and disadvantaged neighborhoods of the city. Aldo Tambellini is no longer there. He left New York in the mid-seventies and ended his relationship with this city of which he was a member.

Tambellini’s career is accompanied by both the correlative of gentrification and that of the assimilation of experimental cinema by the museum institutions. His work is intimately linked to the undeground of his time. Before meeting Aldo we started to walk the streets of the neighborhood today. In those streets there was no trace of what was once. But drift always has a reward. We crossed the neighborhood aimlessly, with the sole intention of losing ourselves as soon as possible. In a very short time we were getting it, we could no longer orient ourselves. In an instant the sound changed. The silence of the clothing stores, galleries and coffee shops disappeared to give way to Caribbean music, Dominican, Puerto Rican voices… And there they were, a little further away, but Tambellini’s neighbors were there.

I have always been opposed to the limits placed on me by society, the political system, the cultural… This came early in my life not attending the Fascist “radunata” where I would have been brainwashed to embrace fascism/the conformity of the art world, the racial delineations.

I had started to feel the restrictions that my paintings posed […] for in order to profuse you painting the artist still dependeds on a gallery, the art critic, an establishment which would accept, bless and diffuse your work. That is when I took to painting glass slides and projecting them from one building to the next in the Lower East Side of New York. There was freedom in seeing my now “paintings” larger than any canvas I could ever paint, projected for the world to see without the acceptance of an art critic, without the blessing of the art establishment without the much hated restrictions imposed on the artist.

Thoughts on Freedom, Aldo Tambellini, 1967

He was born between two lunar eclipses, also between two world wars. The cosmos and his experiences during and after the Second World War go through all his work. He was also strongly influenced by Fontana’s “spatiality” and the German “Zero Group” of which Otto Piene was part, with whom he shared a great friendship that would result in the opening of the Black Gate, a space for experimentation at the top of The Gate Theater, the hall of Aldo and Elsa Tambellini. The Gate Theater opened with an act of protest: the celebration of the New Visions Festival in September of 1966 in response to the fourth edition of the New York Film Festival of which the filmmakers were excluded by the form and content of their movies. It should be remembered the long-standing censorship in the US that implicated even the laboratories, which at one point collaborated in the elimination of films with supposedly “obscene” content. It is well-known the case of the destruction by Kodak of one of the films that Kenneth Anger made in collaboration with Stan Brakhage and Jess Collins in 1954. But the sixties were not better either. Jose Soltero burned a flag of the United States in protest of the Vietnam War in a performance called LBJ in one of the most famous independent theaters of the Lower called The Bridge in early 1966. Elsa Tambellini was the artistic director of this performance and also took care of great part of the programming of this place. Years ago, in this same space, the police had confiscated Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and sent Jonas Mekas to prison. Given its notorious history, The Bridge decided to close its doors for a time out of fear of possible reprisals. This closure was one of the reasons why The Gate Theater opened. All this happened at the same time that Aldo made his Black Film Series.

I started collecting Japanese film trailers, film material and discards. A friend and filmmaker, José Soltero, sold me his Bolex for only 300 $ and I started filming. After endless hours of editing, viewing and re-editing, a series of films were born that were “sensory experiences.” My films became moving paintings.
Conversation with Aldo Tambellini.
October 15, 2016. Cambridge (Massachusetts)

Far from there, in Cambridge, the meeting with Aldo becomes another door to that time that we do not feel mythical but undoubtedly intense. “Outside the theater, next to the entrance, there was a wall in which we made a great collage with the films that were to be projected that month. Every week we changed the programming that could be a compilation of very different films like the ones by the Kuchar Brothers, Stan Vanderbeek, people from the west coast like Bruce Conner who I like especially… Also experimental Japanese cinema. Taka (Takahiko Limura) lived only a few blocks from my house and used to go to Japan a lot, where he shot films of friends from New York, and came back with a lot of Japanese movies that we projected at the Gate. ”

His work is what remains of all that. The pursuit of experience, anger and power is in it.
Aldo Tambellini. Program 1. Tomorrow, Thursday, June 1st at 7:10 p.m. At (S8) Room, PALEXCO.
Program 2. Saturday, June 3 at 8:00 p.m. At CGAI.
Moondial Performance. Saturday 3 June at 23 h. At Luis Seoane Foundation.
Installation Atlantic in Brooklyn. Luis Seoane Foundation.

Luther Price: “Quiero ser fiel a la verdad”

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Blanca Viñas and Albert Alcoz: how La noche inventada was invented

Photography and cinema: the origin
Blanca Viñas: Our hobbies have no obvious roots, but it is true that in both cases they have been fed by family artistic curiosity. I am sure the slideshows in the winter evenings have influenced us in some way.
Albert Alcoz: Yes, there is this family bond and similar environment because we are brothers.

How La noche inventada was invented
B.V.: We often went for a walk together, each with his/her camera, we shared the fact of looking at the landscape and using the opportunity to capture it our way. At the same time we used the analogue medium to exchange techniques or formal resources that each has been adapting to his/her language. In this way we have found dualities and parallels that help us to visualize a contrast between still image and moving image.
A.A.: The origin of this collaboration arises from the fact of programming film showings called Cinema Anémic in a study that I rented at the end of 2014 to finish my doctoral thesis. We already went for walks and made trips to take pictures and film, so the idea of ​​simultaneously projecting the results was a logical evolution. Mixing the photochemical processes, the points of view and the approaches to the photographic and film medium arises from the fact of sharing similar looks with respect to the used devices and the filmed spaces.

Music and other references
B.V.: Family is the excuse to find a nexus, considering that I had already used “cohetes naranjas” as an alias. The name of “Esperando un eclipse” comes from Radio Futura’s song “La estatua del jardín botánico”.
A.A.: It is true that the title of the project comes from a musical theme of Family’s album Un soplo en el corazón. In fact music is a subject that interests us especially, although in the projection we try to escape the fact of adding musical themes. Blanca knows many more references of photographic disciplines and I of the film world, although we do have devotion to the work of artists like Stan Brakhage or Gustav Metzger, to mention two that work the abstraction through still and moving celluloid.

Photochemical tone, emotional tone
B.V.: The fact that there exists this subjective-artistic documentary of my photographic practice helps the viewer understand the process of photographic shot, the walk as an essential element of the photographer as well as some of the existing manipulations. Aspects that can be difficult to understand with a single image.
A.A.: The main tone is containment. Perhaps one of the clearest examples to explain this is the fact of choosing silence and the avoidance of using eloquent sounds that impose certain ways of understanding the show of images. The sounds that are heard in the showing – except for a sound collage rather environmental and atmospheric that is added to some of the films – are the sound magnification of the activated devices themselves and their silent intervals. That emotional tone is already assumed by each viewer in his/her own way, depending on the perception of the images and the temporal cadence of the projection.

The future of the night
B.V.: The idea is to keep on walking, finding different formalities and structures that can be applied to both the film and photographic medium.
A.A: It is a work in progress that varies according to the geographical and temporal circumstances in which it is presented. Ultimately, La noche inventada is a pretext to join forces and continue to do what we like that is to explore other ways of understanding the production of images and sounds through analogue media. It is a way of continuing to search for possible relationships between photography and film, incorporating slides, cinema without a camera and other techniques that may violate the codes of the photochemical image.

María Cañas: I’ll Be Your Mirror

It is obvious we live in a world inundated by images. It is common that people speak in these terms, as well as discourses at the bar on the internet, youtube, and overinformation, and apocalyptic small-minded thinking. But what do you really feel when affected by the archiving disease? What happens when all these questions really possess the individual, to an almost vampirizing point? María Cañas can answer those questions, through a work in which all the excess, madness and the grotesque of society is absorbed, phagocytosed and then transformed with an incredible critical and humorous vision as a tremendous open hand slap.

María Cañas calls “laughstance” to what she does through her videoguerrillas (she invented both terms), a sincere and visceral work that arises from a need to deal with the world as it is presented. On the one hand, it is about managing her own relationship with this image overload: she speaks freely of the compulsive consumption of images, and of the hours, days, and weeks that she spends immersed and lost in the narrow paths of archives and viewing platforms. On the other hand, it is a face-to-face approach to apocalypse feeling it really imminent, and trying to weather the storm (more than storm, tsunami) through the creation and recycling of images.

All this filtered by a special sensitivity that sees in what is terrifying, dysfunctional and dark the most sublime beauty, and by a courage to raise the voice and express to the world without falsehood what is thought, despite everything. From Holy Week in Seville to telepredicators, bullfights or television madness, Cañas’ work is a tour de force for the archive, montages full of images each one more alarming than the other, the final call to see us in a deforming and terrifying mirror and, after doing so, burst out laughing at the reflected horror. A work and a place in the world that she explains better than anyone, in a script in syntony and total parallelism with her audiovisual work: “María Cañas is the Archivist of Seville, The Terrorist Virgin of the Archive, attracting catastrophes and video addict. Pyromaniac of minds. Drown fears and sorrows. María Coñas to serve you. She practices “laughstance”: the humor of all colors, the game and videoguerrilla of connected multitudes, as strategy of insurgency or, at least, of resistance and / or popular survival. A committed activation to the idea of ​​culture as a collective construction of the organic archive and audiovisual detritus as cultural development tools, and with the need to educate in agitation and recycling of our imaginary, so that we would become freer, more critical and creative.”

In this edition of (S8), we will have the opportunity to see several sides of her work. On the one hand, through some of her most recent videoguerrillas. La mano que trina is about the place mobile phones have in our lives, where she shows a black picture of a possible future. Cumbia Against the Machine returns to Expo 92, and to the images of that time to offer a vision of how Spain became a herd of zombies obsessed with the immoral waste and the false promise of progress of the event. And, finally, EXPO LIO goes back to the conquest and plunder of America, to speak of the crossing cultures and the clash of civilizations.

On the other hand, her video installation Risas en la oscuridad represents another of her sides, more relaxing and beautiful, in a piece to three channels composed “exclusively by women: witches, vampires, warriors, innocent and evil, women “bigger than life” who show their power by instituting disorder and revolt through an endless cascade of wild laughter, illuminating the darkness, the supposed death of cinema and literature, with their laughing creative energy. The bad woman, the femme fatale as a cliché of the cinema, “women who do not try to please and serve, nor wait for the moment of motherhood or the return of the male to home. They are goddesses, succubi, giants, women of light and fire, coming from mythology, cinema or the street. Strong, self-sufficient and free, or sometimes, desperate women who rebel against the established. They are women who self-exorcise, who burn in a catharsis of fire.”

Finally, we will also host one of her master classes, a truly performance event. An immersion discussed in her creative universe, a guided tour along the paths that lead to her endless list of references and personal fixations, which in this occasion, under the title “A League of Their Own” proposes “an activating game in which to laugh, to engineer and to get scared of this mondo cane, halfway among the audiovisual show, the cultural agitation, the commented projection and the pataphysical performance action. An experimental meeting inspired by videoguerrilla, appropriationism, fake, “videomaquia”, and the postgeneric, dirt, martian and postmarian video remix hand in hand with (or tail in tail) The Archivist of Seville, María Cañas, and the connected participants. In this party we invite the attendees to enjoy an audiovisual tour prepared by Cañas in which we will shake the images and suspect them. It will also be the moment to know more about processes of appropriationist audiovisual creation and to deal with infinite subjects related to new film narratives after Internet, life, death…

Welcome to the terrifying, marvelous, overwhelming and amusing world of María Cañas.
AulaCREA María Cañas. Today Thursday, June 1 at 12:30 p.m. In the Press Room of Afundación.
Risas en la oscuridad and recent videoguerrillas. From May 30 to June 14 at Luis Seoane Foundation.

Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) co-organizes with (S8) and LIFT the new program of artistic residencies BAICC

Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) co-organizes a new program of artistic residencies together with (S8) Mostra Internacional de Cinema Periférico and LIFT-Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. All those born or resident in Spain willing to create an analogic film at the LIFT facilities in Canada will be eligible for the program, which will last between 4 and 6 weeks.

AC/E a state agency for the promotion of culture, fosters the Spanish creative and cultural sectors through a broad program of activities, fostering the internationalisation of creative professionals, with initiatives such as artist residencies. Projects supported by AC/E underline the diverse Spanish contribution to the global culture, as well as recent contributions of Spanish talent in the main creative fields.

In the next month the call for entries will be announced.