Maria Ruido. The image that thinks
La voz humana (1998). María Ruido
Audiovisual arts as a tool of thought, editing as a form of elaboration of a critical and combative discourse: these are (some) of the weapons of María Ruido, a creator and researcher from Galicia who already has over 20 years of cultural production experience behind her. Precisely because of her rich and multidimensional work, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico of A Coruña is devoting a programme to her that goes beyond the days of the festival, starting on April 21 with the inauguration of an exhibition dedicated to her work at Luis Seoane Foundation (day on which there will also be screened La memoria interior (2002) and Lo que no puede ser visto debe ser mostrado (2010)). It will reach its highest point during the festival with the premiere of Mater amatísima and a meeting with the artist.
Over the years, in María Ruido’s films and installations there have come together strategies such as found footage (which more than “found” is searched, recovered and put in value), the arquive itself, interviews, testimonies and personal documents, the texts of a heterogeneous list of thinkers and even, in some of her works, performance. Each work by Ruido is an investigation and a search, a collage of images and sounds that generates ideas and reflections that attempt to question what is established from the multiplicity of voices and points of view, and rethink the images to which we are exposed every day. The work, the bodies, the construction of the memory and identity and the elaboration of the history are some of the thematic lines of Ruido, who dynamites the media discourse to drink from the personal and collective experience in a political work from its foundations.
In the extensive programme (S8) is devoting to her, there will be shown films that respond to many of her main concerns. This is the case of her look back to the discourse of historical memory, with special emphasis on the Transition with works such as Lo que no puede ser visto puede ser mostrado (2010). This movie brings forward the militant cinema made in Spain over the 1960s and 1970s, and Plan Rosebud 1 / Crime Scene (2008) and Plan Rosebud 2 / Calling the Ghost (2008), which, from the social discussion on the so-called Law of Historical Memory, disproves a series of common places that generate “heroic narratives” (from the monuments to the hegemonic speeches generated by the media and the cinema).
The field of intimacy, the analysis of family ties are reviewed from different perspectives: La memoria interior (2002) is an immersion in the family’s past of the author, which seeks to unravel -from the personal- dynamics and policies of work and migration, and the meaning of belonging to the working class. On the other hand, Mater amatísima (2017) describes, in its subtitle, the direction of her research: it is a review of the imaginary and discourse on motherhood in times of change, starting from the idea of motherhood as a construct and tool of social control.
The (non-neutral) look of Europe on Africa, colonialism and waves of migration from the south to the north are themes that converge in Le rêve est fini / The dream is over (2014) and L’oeil impératif / The imperative eye (2015). In the first, the personal circumstance of Ruido is interwoven with the surrounding political climate, in the scenario of the Tunisian Lampedusa: symbol of the tomb in which the Mediterranean has become for thousands of Africans looking for that dreamland of Europe. A dream that is dying in front of what seems to be the revolution yet to come, the uprising in Africa that seemed to ignite the Arab Spring. On the other hand, L’oeil impératif / The Imperative Eye (2015) is a revision of colonialism, which is no longer based on a political or economic power, but a “hierarchy of thought”, an “epistemological hegemony”. A work that Morocco takes as a case study, to try to imagine new ways of constructing renewed visual genealogies.
To complete the journey through the work by Ruido we find the exhibition “Le paradis”, which takes its title from the homonymous self-portrait prepared by the author that revolves around the idea of the “paradise” of childhood. In addition to this work, the exhibition includes works from the late 1990s such as Ethics of Care (1999), Hansel y Gretel (1998), Cronología (1998) and La voz humana (1998), in which she talks about the construction of identity (especially women identity) since childhood and the policies of the body, in many cases using the body itself as a tool of expression and performative action.
María Ruido is an artist, director, researcher and teacher. She currently lives in Madrid and Barcelona, where she is a lecturer in the Department of Art and Visual Culture of the University of Barcelona. Since 1998 she has been developing her audiovisual work that has been shown in cultural and art centers such as the CGAC, in Santiago de Compostela, the MACBA, the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica and the CCCB, in Barcelona, La Casa Encendida and the MNCA Reina Sofía, in Madrid, the Kunstverein, in Munich, the Cervantes Institutes of Sofia, Milan, Berlin and Prague, the CCEBA, in Buenos Aires, and the Film Archive of the UNAM, in Mexico, among others. Her works have also been at festivals and events such as the FID Marseille, DocumentaMadrid, the Mostra International de Films de Dones in Barcelona, Zemos, Márgenes, Rencontres Internationales Paris / Berlin / Madrid, and Art Basel Hong Kong, among many others. In addition, she has written for various books and publications, and is the author of a book about Ana Mendieta.
