Doors to the Sea, will be an evening that features an eclectic selection of experimental super 8 short films made by members of AREA (Argentine Association of Experimental Filmmakers and Video-Artists) that exhibit the contemporary super 8mm practices of Buenos Aires, Argentina. AREA members Marto Alvarez and Ana Villanueva will be in attendance to showcase a program of 15 very short travelogues, experimental documentaries and portraits that use a range of techniques and materials. The contributing artists use a variety of different methods to explore the Super 8’s materialistic and imaginative latitude. This includes direct filmmaking and other cameraless approaches, multiple exposures and matte boxes, the use of archival footage, and in-camera editing techniques, straight eight technique, single frame shooting, and more. These films find material rooted in their surroundings; building city symphonies with observational shooting and found footage, or creating hazy dreamscapes and animated portraits with hand-processing, and scratch techniques.

Join Marto and Ana for a conversation following the program around the work and techniques of the collective and their continued reverence and commitment to the small format celluloid.

Disorganized internal memories that aim to connect with an intervened childhood. 322 passport photos found in 812 Maipú St.

Welder makes reference to the act of welding as a metaphor for montage and creative processes. The union of parts that were not directly related as a creative act that produces new meaning. This film is composed of a scrupulous selection taken from a 13-hour super 8 family archive. The appropriation of someone else’s memory and its subsequent manipulation elevating it to a metaphorical, poetic and mythological dimension.

A moment within the uncanny filmed on a roll or super 8 within the international airport in Amsterdam after having eaten psychedelic mushrooms. The film was developed by hand.

A hallucinated journey through the people and architecture of the city of Barcelona.

Traditional Christmas tents of live carp fish on the streets of Prague.

The filming of a town in Entre Ríos where nature seems to be an accomplice to the already hazy history of a factory.

Doors to the sea. Mysteries that will be revealed by the keen eye.

“A walker understands gradually that he does not know much about the turbulent and airy flow of the spirit. Or he is incapable of defining it. Nevertheless, he connects with it every time he discovers that his own person constitutes a fragile material structure in the hands of nature’s fluctuations, far from social intermediaries. However, he adapts his definition of “natural” to the changes of his own mind: today is freezing because I freeze, tomorrow the sun burns because I dry out”.
Fragment of “The book of Haiku” by Alberto Silva.

Subjective camera tribute to Beckett and Keaton. A sequence of images edited on camera with a posteriori sound intervention. Cinescape opens windows through the bars. Its title invites the viewer to let go, taken away by the lens-shot. A double move in which a shot makes the world its prey and releases it again in the projection: a game of light and shadows.
* A pun. Cinescape is an invented compound word Cine (cinema) + escape. At the same time, phonetically it sounds exactly the same as “sin escape”, which means no or without escape. Sound intervention: ROM (Roberto Etcheverry & Omar Grandoso)

On May 9, 2012 , is sanctioned in Argentina the Gender Identity Law (No. 26,743).
It stipulates that everyone has the right “to the recognition of their gender identity, to free development of his person according to their gender identity, and to be treated according to their gender identity, and in particular, to be identified in thus in the instruments evidencing regarding the identity / name, image and gender with which is registered.

Thus affirm another world.
Who conditions us identity? To be.
Individual existence. Collective existence.
We are traversed by otherness.
We are the transformations who are overlapped.

If a woman’s body were introduced into a film camera, could it demonstrate its utopian character? A body repeated, deformed, incinerated by light, wandering through unintelligible windows, looking at a horizon of imaginary clouds. Nevertheless, no matter how much the image is exposed, the body is inexhaustible.

Shadow figures sketch a little story at tea time.

This film is conceived by the simple desire to capture, document and keep the light of a quotidian space that I was about to leave. Trying to catch some of that atmosphere on images.

An animated portrait of windmills in Patagonia, Argentina.

Conjectures about the animal that bumps into itself, aims for big things, and gets sick of it all.

Ana Villanueva was born in Buenos Aires in 1979, she is a visual artist and engineer (University of Buenos Aires). Her work consists of photography, installations, sound pieces, and Super 8 films.