Manuela de Laborde

Fiñe

In what was my third visit to La Havana and initially a trip commissioned to experimentally register the making of a public sculpture, I found myself walking while waiting. Waiting, together with the main artists, to know if the making of the piece would even take place while some permits were on hold. Uncertainty and my limited time there, a little over a month, uncoupled the works. I found myself walking, revisiting, but also filming.

Fictions

Ficciones is a spell that conjures representations as if imagined from the perspective of the plant world, that which invents prior to consciousness, as a thinking before thinking (M. Marder). Ceramic sculptures were gardened for a year letting plant life grow on them as their skin. Four super-8 cameras were made into a mobile, thereby also filming the process and its shared motion. To embrace the filmed material as a fictional construction, it was optically printed and altered; to accompany the notion of the sculptures as possible chests, containers of heart, vocal sounds were recorded with Camila de Laborde and weaved into the film.

Liminal

A FICUNAM commission for four directors, Liminal seeks to play with poetic affinities between film and music. Moving across aesthetic and generational differences, the film-makers explore this relationship through four distinct stories as to context and imaginary.

In the Era

Abstract 16mm work documenting a group of artists immersed in the jungle among the surreal constructions of Edward James while creating sculptural works of their own. A diptych of the filmmakers' subjective style, it uses colour and black-and-white to create two separate dreamlike and fragmented expressions of a single event.

Luis Carricaburu

Luis Carricaburu executes the movement languidly but at the same time with emphasis, with generous patience, towards the camera, as if he feared that the negative would not be able to record it. The movement has been stripped of its perpetual combustion. Abstract gestures from their surroundings recombine to produce a language without content, ghosts of something that, elsewhere, is still alive at the same time.

Azúcar y saliva y vapor

Investigates with minimalism and tenderness, offering a counterproposal, the cinematic desire to be enveloping and three-dimensional.

As Without So Within

Manuela de Laborde's experimental film, 'As Without So Within', explores the possibility that the surface of things is an entity worthy of is own depth for itself and in itself, demanding to be seen and confronted as such. The project accepted what is visual as emotion the moment the images were created with a focus on the sensorial.

Santa Teresa & Other Stories

In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line between journalism and detective work. Based on an unfinished book by Roberto Bolaño, his character investigates a handful of crimes and abuses perpetrated on women and workers of the zone.

Spider

Intimate play locating the phenomenon of animation; once the hand comes in touch with the object, the other. La araña (Spider) to my hand is what my hand is to the spider. A duet, a revelation of intention, while leaving the point of inception unlit.

Blueprint of Moving Image

Much of its visions, like the conceptual frame the title gives, still holds for me.