CRA’P Colaborations 2024
VISIONS OF AN EXPANDED TIME
16 March from 18:30h to 20:30h
Cultural Centre La Marineta, Mollet del Vallès
Limited places with prior reservation: info@cra-p.org / 666 763 504
Free Entrance
CRA’P in collaboration with the Archives OVNI – Observatory of Video Not Identified and the Cultural Centre ‘La Marineta’, presents a video program with a subsequent discussion about the transmitted and evoked presences through vital experiences in symbiosis with nature and its cycles. Alessandro Quaranta and Scott Barley have in common an attitude of radical permanence when facing the experience of that which is observed and the vision delivered to the audience.
• Incanto (Enchantment) by Alessandro Quaranta (2022). Italy. No dialogue. 12’
A little girl sleeps wrapped in her blankets. A lampshade that projects large areas of shadow is the source of a brightness that spreads from the inside of a room, like the circles generated by a stone thrown into the water, until it reaches the most distant places. What is manifested inside reverberates in the environment outside, because it is made of the same material. The video is a chant, a natural prayer in order to live as long as possible.
• The Green Ray by Scott Barley (2017). South Wales (UK). No dialogue. 12’
A Green Ray that never features. Instead, we sense it – seeing beyond our own eyes, beyond the hills – we sense it for an instant. We are plunged into the unknowable, beyond the horizon, beyond seeing altogether. In a single 11 minute take, the film takes us from lush sunsets, to beyond the green ray, and into the gloaming, into the heavy night’s darkness, where we await the impending storm.
• Lumen by Alessandro Quaranta (2006). Italy. No dialogue. 4’20”
The neutral surface of the screen is continuously traversed by luminous interferences. The surface, defined by the screen, is traversed by a beam of light in multiple directions, revealing bodies of different nature and identity. Light, as a technical resource, names the object and, in its incessant movement, establishes a play of correspondences.
Light is the eye that forms a singularity from the whole.
Light is the language that isolates from the indistinct noise of sounds.
• Womb by Scott Barley (2017). South Wales (UK). No dialogue. 16’
The Mouth screams. Like a shadow, it looms on the event horizon. It swells, hunting the night like a snake in the dark. The laceration tears through the stars, devouring its meal. Within the nothing swims something of a memory of movement. Far beyond, something out of the black reveals itself. In the infinite womb, limbs drift suspended, like flies in a giant spider web. An infinite sea of pale flesh. Bodies without organs. Death’s renewal awaits, as the bodies pass through the void.
• I testimoni si liberano al tramonto della luce (The testimonies are released during twilight) by Alessandro Quaranta (2023). Italy. No dialogue. 5’45”
What happens when a place is abandoned by humans?
Thereby, where for a long time there have been temporary settlements of marginalised, rejected, undocumented communities in tents or dilapidated dwellings made from the waste materials of our welfare civilisation, when they are forcibly displaced, it is nature that takes their place.
Here, the gaze moves in a forest on the outskirts of a city, which grew up where only twenty years earlier there was a Roma camp.
Only at nightfall is it possible to glimpse the testimonies of these tenures, which emerge as remnants one cannot retain, like absurd intuitions that disappear as soon as one thinks have understood them.
• Retirement by Scott Barley 2013. South Wales (UK). No dialogue. 3’
A solitude found in the distant storm.
• Soglie (Thresholds) by Alessandro Quaranta (2016). Italy. No dialogue. 14’
There are many protagonists in this video: the woods, above all, and different types of animals, natural light effects, installations by various artists (these were installed along the pathway in a Piedmont Valley in the North West of Italy as a result of a production of material in the field occurred during the project “La collera delle lumache” [The Snails’ Wrath]), the stream, the sky, and other landscapes.
Each of these elements, from time to time, can ‘take over the scene’ of Thresholds, becoming the momentary protagonist of the work, totally without any pre-established hierarchies.
An intangible entity that was possible to document only by evoking it with this composition of images and sounds, all of which are absolutely authentic and not treated in any way during post-production.
One could define Thresholds as an epic of the events of those days, that which was seen by the invisible eyes of the woods and narrated by the forest itself. I repeatedly dreamed of it over the long term that I devoted myself to the choice of images and sounds, and to their transformation, and now tell my dream to everyone who sees this video work.
• The Ethereal Melancholy Of Seeing Horses In The Cold by Scott Barley 2012. South Wales (UK). No dialogue. 4’
A silent short, focusing on the beauty and melancholia of seeing horses in the cold fog, and the metaphors that manifest, as time passes.
• Les animaux de Stella (The animals of Stella) by Alessandro Quaranta (2019). Italy. No dialogue. 15’
While out exploring in the winter months, an almost prodigious chance encounter bring me to the shores of the lake ‘des Eaux-Chaudes’ (Alps of Haute Provence, France), the place that will become a creation laboratory of the video installation The animals of Stella.
The human voice frees itself from the coded language and interacts with other sounds becoming part of the place, which in turn is internalized by the child. Thus a reciprocal dialogue is established, a spontaneous communication that brings out an intimate bond of affection.
An equal relationship is progressively fostered between the girl and the environment that welcomes her, in an attempt to renew the ancient relationships between human and non-human.
Duration 86’
The materials contained in the OVNI Archives are the result of various thematic research projects, a whole constellation of titles with the common denominator of their free expression and reflection on individual and collective fears and pleasures. It builds together a vision of multiple facets, like thousands of little eyes, that deepen and explore our world, or announce other possible ones.
Alessandro Quaranta is a videoartist born in Turin in 1975. His work has been shown at CAIRN Centre d’art (Digne-les-Bains, FR), at the Musée Gassendi (Digne-les-Bains, FR) in 2019 ; at GAM (Museum of Modern Art of Turin) in 2014 ; at FSRR (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo), and Autograph ABP (London, (UK) in 2012; at the Lousiana Museum of Modern Art (DK) in 2011; at PAV (Turin), and CESAC (Caraglio, IT) in 2010; at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Caracas, Venezuela) in 2009; at DOCVA, CareOF (Milan) in 2008. He participated at the Triennale du Valais (CH) in 2014, and at the X Biennale de Lyon (FR) in 2009.
Scott Barley studied Art & Design at Cardiff Metropolitan University, where he focused on themes of existential angst, self-sabotage, isolation, and metaphysics. His work has been associated with the Remodernist film and slow cinema movements, and more recently, anthropocenic, cosmological, and phenomenological cinema. His work has often been compared with the sensibilities of Stan Brakhage, Philippe Grandrieux, Béla Tarr, Maya Deren, and Jean Epstein. In mid-2014, the first comprehensive history of the Remodernist film movement was published at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris; a 244-page thesis by Florian Maricourt, under the research direction of Nicole Brenez. The document includes a rich dissection of Scott Barley’s filmography and artwork, along with other prominent members of the movement, including Jesse Richards, Peter Rinaldi, Billy Childish, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Dean Kavanagh, Roy Rezaäli, Heidi Beaver and Harris Smith. Since early 2015, Barley has exclusively shot his films on an iPhone. His short film, Hinterlands was voted one of the best films of 2016 in Sight and Sound’s yearly film poll. His first feature-length work, Sleep Has Her House was released in early 2017, garnering universal acclaim, and winning Best Film – Official Jury award at FRONTEIRA International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, in Goiânia, Brazil. His work has been screened throughout Europe and the American countries in spaces such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, BFI Southbank, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doclisboa, Karlovy Vary IFF, Dokufest, EYE Filmmuseum, Vancouver International Film Centre, Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro or Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Buenos Aires. His visual practice and research have been used as educational material in postgraduate and doctoral courses at UCLA Arts: School of the Arts and Architecture in Los Angeles or Université Sorbonne Nouvelle — Paris 3, among many others. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
