Oriol Sánchez
Waking Window's aka Victoria's Wake is inspired by horror shows, like the magic lantern and phantasmagoria. It consists of several variations around the origins of the moving image and the death of cinematograph as support and device for projection.
Profanaciones seems to stem from the suspicion that you can hear what you see: a piano, a foliage moved by the wind, the knocking of a door, but that, at the same time, you cannot see what you hear, that the look can hear, but the ear cannot see, something that is expressed directly in the subtitle, The ears do not have eyelids. In other words, part of the assumption that "there is no reciprocity between sight and hearing." Hence, generally, there is much more music that is created around the cinema or the image than its opposite, cinema that is generated from music.
Almost like an ethnographic documentary, "Moza de Animas !, records a centennial ritual that takes place in the Salamanca town of La Alberca: the journey through the narrow streets of the town that every night a woman prays and plays the shearing for the deceased. The spectral character of his figure, sometimes just a shadow, is accentuated, and somewhat denatured, by the sound work where this archaic litany is overlaid with subtle electronic rhythms.
Built almost entirely with found footage, "De la hospitalidad, derecho de autor" claims, on the one hand, the appropriation of the material of one author (here the sacrosanct Rossellini, Welles, Erice and Kiarostami) by another. And, on the other, it supposes a reflection on the role of the spectator in front of the cinematograph as a medium that represents reality, constructs imaginaries and that, for the most part, demands our credulity. "De la hospitalidad ..." invites, therefore, to discover this author / spectator mediation, through three pieces or chapters of a practically autonomous nature.
"'Where is the spirit?' it is a reflection on cinema made from another medium, video, which allows us to easily appropriate these two films and operate from their grammar, to dismantle them and directly point out the relationships that potentially existed between them. Imagine what would happen if a spectator were to enter inside that dark device? This is exactly what is staged in this video. Unexpected things happen, a "miraculous" meeting between Ana and Ahmad. The girl from 'Where is the spirit?' She is a spectator who is not only in front of the Kiarostami film, but materially within it, she is an intruder who bursts into the action. and somehow the death of a traditional type of spectator is enunciated, one who seeks empathy with the protagonists. It seems that empathy with fictional characters is no longer possible, this new viewer is situated in a different place, demands new projection spaces and, of course, other types of forms. " - Celeste Araújo.
"Opus Incertum, is a tribute to Dalí's concrete irrationality. Part of video-sound improvisations (mixes of film fragments, television commercials, educational or scientific videos, fragments of his own works ...) and the resulting ephemeral accidents, revelations that establish disturbing analogies, in an open process on chance. Around this base I tried to construct, or rather to re-construct, the narrative, in accordance with the critical paranoid-process. The result of this experiment is the materialization in images of delusional associations, sometimes unpleasant, enigmatic or eschatological. Opus incertum is an unfinished work, testimony of the collaborative work, between the year 2000-2002, with Javier Otaduy ".
"To make Pubic hair ban, whose title refers to the Japanese censorship that in the past decade prohibited showing pubic hair in videos, Oriol Sánchez left for months a coil of super 8 gay porn exposed to the sun inside a rusty can with water and various chemicals. The degradation of celluloid randomly affected his images, which appear out of focus, veiled, hidden. The important thing about these examples is that the intervention of the artists censoring the sexual explicitness of some images from a filmic genre , the pornographic, characterized precisely by facilitating the extreme visibility of sex. "
It is a travel diary that covers the topography of the landscape, both in nature and in urban graphic and architectural details: commercial signs, door numbers, tiles, statues, pictograms, arabesques, emblems, allegories ...
