Cry of Oblivion: A series of videos selected by the Non-Identified Video Observatory | Activity
As part of whispersMACBA’s 30th anniversary live arts program, the Non-Identified Video Observatory (OVNI) will present a video screening session. Between 1996 and 1998, OVNI curated 16 pioneering thematic video programs at the museum, laying the groundwork for MACBA’s first video library. This new project revisits the spirit of critical exploration of images that characterized that foundational experience, reactivating its potential for thinking about gaps, archives and contested memories.
In the face of such an overwhelming present, this session attempts to detach itself from historical facts and delve into a realm belonging to the domain of reverie: visible and invisible, enigmatic remains; memories that are becoming fragile; and the spirit of the forest, still hiding secrets. Revisiting and updating ruins. Low-resolution testimonies in the tangible, living space of a screen, where we can hear the absence.
Three sequences of time from the Non-Identified Video Observatory archives presenting a hermetic spectrum that requires and encourages interpretation. Ranging from memories of interruptions or the suspicious absence of something tangible following a tragedy to intimate and direct statements that name the unthinkable, this session immerses us in the oblivion of a series of situations that are distant from each other yet all close to our present. At the time, they may have seemed to pass in worrying silence, but they now prove to be revealing. Their remains speak softly of presences and premonitions that are difficult to name; fragments that engage in dialogue with the visible and invisible traces left behind by violence, destruction and processes of transformation. Through various strategies, these films explore the fragility of memory, the rewriting of history and the unreal that seeps into our everyday experience.
A reflection that reveals the unreality of a transition we are still awakening from, yet already beginning to forget as we embark on a new one.
A screening of time and dust, resulting from a buried dream, or dreams of screaming while the stars spoke to me yesterday, before dawn. Sequences of time on the traces of oblivion.
Programme
19:00 – 19:15 h
Presentation by Non-Identified Video Observatory
19:15 – 20:30 h
Screenings
Maya Wołinska, 2014, 15 min
In a city, there is a forgotten house with a distinctive relief carving above the door. It depicts a pair of children looking at a house hidden deep in the forest. Not far away is a real, mysterious forest full of treasures from a bygone era. Gold and silver glisten in the sunset, while the depths of the underground conceal the history of those who have been forgotten. All that remains is slowly being swallowed by the earth and time. Traces of the past in an Eastern European city: a memory that will soon be reduced to rubble and a collection of soulless objects.
Room Service for Bombed Buildings
Dionis Escorsa O’Callaghan, 2004, 27 min
Six years after being bombed by NATO forces, some buildings in Belgrade remain as they were following the bombing. Inside one such building, the same group of women who used to clean and maintain it now meet, acting and working as if no time had passed.
the pain
Iñaki Álvarez, 1996, 28 min
Several people talk about their concept and experience of pain.
20:30 – 21:30 h
Q&A with Iñaki Álvarez, Dionis Escorsa O’Callaghan, and Maya Wołinska, moderated by the OVNI
participant
OVNI, the Spanish acronym for the Non Identified Video Observatory – Desorg dot Org (and also Spanish for UFO) is an art research project founded in Barcelona in 1993 by members of La 12 Visual (Nuria Canal, Joan Leandre, Toni Serra, Rosa Llop and Simona Marchesi). From the start the project has set out to explore contemporary culture through video, still images and the web, avoiding ready-made formats and opting for research as an adventure in knowledge. Its archive features over 2,158 titles–of which 1,281 are accessible online–ranging from the analogue era to the digital present. OVNI has organized themed series at venues including CCCB and MACBA, featuring debates, workshops, subtitling and a critical focus on identity, globalization, resistances and migration, among others. In 2004 it won the Catalan Government’s National Cultural Heritage Award. Since 2020 it has worked nomadically, concentrating its work in Desorg dot org, a publishing workshop and website that combines the archive as a tool for output, digital authorship projects and physical events.
read more
This action is part of whispersa live arts program running over twelve months to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the museum. The program makes use of the poetry of the unfinished, undocumented or simply unmade to review key episodes in the recent past.
