POSSIBLE CARTOGRAPHIES: VALENTINA ALVARADO MATOS & CARLOS VÁSQUEZ MÉNDEZ

This program is based on a dialogue between two Barcelona-based artists whose works have recently entered Light Cone’s collection. It will culminate in a cinematographic performance they have conceived together.

Valentina Alvarado Matos is a Venezuelan artist whose practice involves collage, film, and sculpture. In her films, the combination of manual actions carried out in front of the camera and poetic associations between words and images produce a reflection on the representation of landscape and memory. The films presented here combine play and correspondences of images with processes referring in turn to notions of diaspora, language, and ecology.

Carlos Vásquez Méndez is a visual artist and researcher. His artistic interests include the relationship between art and document, discourses on representing the real, and traces of colonialism and violence in the history of his birthplace, Chile. The two films included in the program, on the frontier between documentary and visual essay, address questions linked to the perception of time and post-colonial geography.

Together, Valentina Alvarado Matos and Carlos Vásquez Méndez have been investigating the possibilities of expanded cinema for a number of years, creating installations and performances using a wide range of resources and operations (Super8 and 16mm film, photography, archives, texts, sounds). Their most recent collaboration Fuegofocfire (And If Seeing Was Fire) is a performance for four 16mm projectors and live sound. It explores certain aspects common to the work of both artists: examining the materiality of the film medium in relation to light and time, playing with elements of the landscape, creating poetic echos between images and sounds.