Observatory Archives 2020

/ CONTEXT 1994 - 2020

Observatory Archives 2020

Founded in 1994, OVNI (Observatorio de Video No Identificado) is a video-based research project that focuses on the analysis and critique of a significant part of contemporary culture. Created by video makers rather than cultural managers or curators, OVNI has always shunned the stereotype of the competitive festival and new releases. It is a project run by creators about creators who use the medium of independent video, in which creative practice has always been imperative. With the birth of the Observatory Archives in 1999 as one of its milestones, OVNI has witnessed three crucial decades, observing the birth of the internet, the transition from analogue to digital, and the tectonic shifts in the political and spiritual strata of contemporary culture. All of which have been reflected in its archives.

In 2020, OVNI offers a collectively mapped itinerary through this period. Under the title “ WINTER'S END ”, it presents four sessions of video-reverie, in a programme that subtly speaks of being adrift in the present moment and of memory. The title refers to a notion that is evocative, but also, more specifically, given the dates of the sessions, to the last days of winter and the transition to lightness. A concreate reference in overly volatile times, an evocation in times of loss.

Winter's End is held in memory of Toni Serra-Abu Ali, who met with death on 21 November 2019. Co-founder of OVNI and author of an important and extensive video oeuvre, the OVNI 2020 programme is guided by some of his works: each session begins and ends with one of his videos, in line with the thematic thread of each day’s programming. But it also includes many of his lesser-known titles, some made under a pseudonym, others anonymously.

Winter 's End- OVNI 2020, is not a retrospective or a representative survey of the Observatory Archives: that would be entirely impossible given the extent of the collection. However, at a moment in its history very much marked by Toni’s death, twenty-seven years after its foundation the Observatory is taking its extensive collection as a starting point for a particular reading. A look at fundamental questions and fragments, witnesses, and landscapes from these decades, which connect and establish a dialogue with a chaotic present presided by loss.

Without focusing on a clearly defined theme, Winter's End contemplates the drifting of the present in a programme marked by loss, in a space of time of attentive reading and of slowness, based on a desire to recover an intimate relationship with images.

Sensing the Twilight (day 1)

The first session of OVNI 2020 presents video portraits from the 1980s and 1990s, video diaries, people who talk to and with the camera on their own, in the low resolution and slower pace of analogue times. We observe video as it was then, more naïve, and therefore with a greater sense of freedom in relation to the media, through works made in pre-digital times, when the explosive spread of social media was still undreamt of. Pieces like Iñaki Álvarez’s El Dolor (1996), in which a group of people talk about their notion of pain, alone except for the camera; Xavier Hurtado’s Interview Agency (1992), a project in post-Olympic Barcelona that reveals the tension between the interviewer-cameraman and the interviewee, between transparency and manipulation, ideology and neutrality. Works that were particularly significant at the time, also in OVNI programmes in the 1990s, as was Ardele Lister’s Split (1981), in which a teenager talks about running away from home, and It Happens to the Best of Us (1989) in which she looks back on the episode as a young woman eight years later.

Crossing Mirages (day 2)

The second day of OVNI 2020 is a session that moves between loss and oblivion, illusion, and, finally, recognition in the essence. It includes important works like Marcos on Media (1996), which addresses the role of the independent media in the decade of globalisation; Una Cruz en la Selva (2006), a look back at colonised Guinea through historical archival materials, and Now I Become Death (2012), a reconsideration of Openheimer’s words after the first nuclear test, both edited by Toni Serra under a pseudonym. This second session swings between dreamlike moments and more concrete references situated in specific historical and geopolitical realities. But they all lead to the dissolution of materiality in Satsanga, en compañía de la realidad (2012), Toni Serra’s study on the non-dualistic nature of reality based on archival footage of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. This fundamental questioning of experience and its origin in unity is one of the core themes of the research at the heart of the Observatory Archives over the years.

Arriving at Memory (day 3)

A third session rounds off the main section of the End of Winter trilogy of programmes: a spectrum ranging from the notion of the personal relationship with the image, the media versus intimacy, and the days of “analogue naivety”, to the period of the consolidation of globalisation and the digital boom, by way of the true nature of reality and the exploration beyond the drifting moment in which we all find ourselves in one way or another, individually or collectively. On this third day, works like Toni Serra’s 7 Contemplaciones (2016), Till Passo’s Mast Qalandar (2005), and Dee Dee Halleck’s Bronx Baptism perhaps share a sense of devotion, community in unity, and contemplation as the path to becoming the other.

There is a fourth programme that we like to call the “Opening” session. Perhaps an opening up to times and spaces that will come in our interaction and continuity with the world. In any case, it is a session dedicated to Toni Serra-Abu Ali, with his works Al Barzaj (2010) and En el Camino de las Abejas (2018), which was his last video, made for the exhibition Beehave at the Fundació Joan Miró, OVNI 2020 Opening also presents two special titles in the archive, Xavier Hurtado’s Pi'txi (Acompañante) (2010) and Keith Sanborn’s For the Birds (2000).

OVNI Archives – Observatorio de Vídeo No Identificado

Rosa Llop, Simona Marchesi, Joan Leandre.

Toni Serra *) Abu Ali

/ VIDEO ESSAY 2001-2016 /

/ THE BLACK TAPES / TV CODE /

/ EL HAMDULILLAH TAPES * PIRATE UTOPIAS & EUROPEAN RENEGADOES /

/ THE RAIN IN DUAR MSUAR /

Entre el Agora y la Frontera

Toni Serra *) Abu Ali

/ TONI SERRA *) ABU ALI

The sheaves of wheat hide the thorns of the jujube... drops of blood are sown in the dust

the woman's belly enters full moon... announcing a still-distant October

the harvest is a time of Remembrance, of gratitude.

The public presentation

The Purple Meridians is a joint project by three organisations in Spain, Italy and Turkey that brings together eighteen women filmmakers, six from each country, to debate the difficulties faced by women working in the filmmaking industry and wider screen sector. The aim is to share strategies for overcoming common obstacles and set up a support and exchange network for future partnerships crisscrossing Europe from east to west.

The project is made up of three workshops, an online roundtable, onsite screenings in Barcelona, Turin and Diyarbakır and an online programme featuring a selection of films by the participating filmmakers. The films, subtitled in English, will be made available on the streen.org platform, free of charge on the first day (to be decided on the basis of the onsite screenings) and then on a pay-per-view basis for three months.

Once the onsite and online workshops have been held in Barcelona, Turin and Diyarbakır,  each group will watch the videos of the workshops held by the other two groups and draw up a set of conclusions to share at the online international roundtable.

The filmmakers resident in Catalonia ( Anna Giralt Gris, Raquel Marques, Pilar Monsell , Ro Caminal, Lara Vilanova i Lili Marsans) will meet at the Centre Cívic Pati Llimona , where they will connect with Turin (as part of the Torino Film Festival) and Diyarbakır (Turkey).

OVNI, Mostra de Films de Dones i l’Alternativa will present a programme of films made up of two films by each of the eighteen participating filmmakers.

The remaining shorts will be screened on the same day on a continuous loop on a monitor at the Pati Llimona Civic Centre.

All the films will be available from 3 December in their original language with English subtitles on purplemeridians.org .

1- Spain Workshop (onsite)

     Monday 15 November , 4 pm to 8 pm

    Sala Raval, CCCB, Not open to the public

2- Spain Workshop (online)

    Monday 22 November , Not open to the public

3- International Roundtable (online)

    Saturday 27 November, 11 am to 12.30 pm

    Open to the public, The roundtable will be held in English

4- The Purple Meridians Screenings

    Thursday 2 December , 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm

    Centre Cívic Pati Llimona, Free admission

    Films in their original language with Catalan subtitles

The Purple Meridians is a joint project by three organisations in Spain, Italy and Turkey with the support of 2021 Eurimages Gender Equality Sponsorship.

http://purplemeridians.org/

http://purplemeridians.org/

/ CONTEXT 1994 - 2020

Path of Return / OVNI 2018

visions, silence, darkness

A few years ago – just after OVNI The Border as Centre (and perhaps as a consequence of it) – we entered a period of introspection. And in that inward-looking space, certain images from Bela Tarr’s film The Turin Horse (1) kept returning over and over again. In particular, three sequences:

In the first, an elderly man struggles to drive his horse and loaded cart through a fog-filled landscape. After a while, we begin to understand the need for so much effort: the driver is one-armed, and a cart intended for two horses is being pulled by just one. Something is missing in this soulless world. A profound lack of balance is causing it to crack and at the same time bringing it to a standstill. The mutilated substance of that which animates it, mutilated itself, is crushed under its own weight and sinks on its blind side. Every gesture, every task, even eating, is arduous.

In the second scene, a character appears on screen and delivers a wild, lucid monologue about the course the world has taken: “everything has been debased that they’ve acquired (…) whatever they touch – and they touch everything – they’ve debased (…) Acquire debase, debase, acquire. Or I can put it differently if you like: to touch, debase and thereby acquire, or touch, acquire and thereby debase. It’s been going on like this for centuries (….) Because this is not some kind of cataclysm, coming about with so-called innocent human aid. On the contrary, it’s about man’s own judgement.”

The cart driver’s answer is laconic: “Come off it, that’s rubbish”. (2)

Then, the wind, the barren plain, the loneliness.

In the third scene, near the end of the film… as night falls, the two main characters, father and daughter, try to light an oil lamp or at least a candle but they are unable to do so. Light has already left that world.

Light is leaving the world.

For months and months, as we were saying, these images played over and over inside us, suggesting a possible path but also imperceptibly plunging us into their dense fog. We tried to navigate inside it but we could barely see our hand stretched out before us. So we walked for a time through that invisible world, and little by little we learnt to trust that fog, that not-knowing, that not-seeing with our eyes, until we came, in a sense, to recognise ourselves in it… Once this state had stabilised we shared it with the rhizome that gives rise to ovni, and this was how a few people came to talk to us about death and deaths (3) … and how the “Path of Return” unexpectedly opened up in the fog, not denying it but rather incorporating it like a veil that protects the mystery that surrounds us and runs through us at every moment.

And so this OVNI of fog takes us on a journey through the middle world, the experience of physical death and of the deaths of the ego.

Instead of a regular video programme, it takes the form of a rite of passage in which visions (videos), texts, sounds, rituals, and breaths are interwoven with shared silence and darkness.

To open up our vision (4), to open up to the awareness of that which we call film, video… those strange projections of light and shadow that portray worlds and lives, landscapes and feelings that arise in the dark cave of the screening room. It is there, in that shared or solitary darkness, that visions of worlds are incubated… before the emergence of boundaries between the real and the unreal, wakefulness and sleep, life and death… Visions on a white screen that will remain white once the visions of the worlds have disappeared. (5)

Perhaps an old wound in our culture and our lives is thus healed, the hemispheres come together, other eyes open, and the Turin horse is no longer beaten. (6)

So as not to separate death from life, each day’s journey will begin by passing through the gates of dreams – death’s twin – and trance, exploring the rituals of farewell and dissolution of the body… A contemplation of dissolution that will lead us to the grateful contemplation of life.

So Path of Return unfolds as a rite of passage, a journey that we recommend making in full each day (*), to aid in a good crossing through intense and sometimes difficult inner landscapes that may perhaps help us to regain the perception of the unlimited, inappropriable, unrepresentable nature of the Real.

(*) OVNI will take place from 7 to 11pm each day.

The CCCB Theatre will open at 7pm. Once the programme starts the doors will remain closed, opening at least twice more in the course of each evening. The Lobby of the Theatre will be open from 7 to 11pm, and a room nearby will be fitted out and equipped with audio recordings for those waiting.

The Turin Horse ( A torinói ió in the Hungarian original) is a 2011 film directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky.

Transcription of the monologue from The Turin Horse :

The people who come to mind are Palmar Álvarez Blanco, Marco Antonio Regueiro, … and also all those who have already left us during this long period of searching

Abu Ali, Abrir la Visión, 2016

http://www.al-barzaj.org/2016/10/abrir-la-vision.html

This image is often used by Ramana Maharashi.

According to the oft-repeated story, Nietzsche was in Piazza Carlo Alberto when he noticed the driver of a hansom cab flogging his stubborn horse. Nietzsche ran towards them, threw his arms around the horse’s neck to protect him, and then collapsed on ground.

March 2018, 8th - 11th / 19:00h - 23:00h

Image de Thierry DE CORDIER, “MER GROSSE”.

2017 - The Unseen Workshop

/ TONI SERRA *) ABU ALI

Toni Serra *) Abu Ali

An activity in the framework of OVNI programme for 2017 at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona that proposes -with the help of videos and texts- to go in depth into the notion of the invisible. Given by Toni Serra (Abu Ali), the workshop goes from the political to the poetic, or from poetry to mysticism.

From forced invisibility to permanent exhibition in the panopticon. The image as a veil. Tunnels of reality. The reality of the dream. Crossing the other side. On contemplation. The one and the multiple.

You are asleep and your vision is a dream; all you are seeing is a mirage. (1)

Capitalism’s gigantic audio-visual machine, like all its machines, is driven by an extractivist impulse: life as an infinite reservoir to be exploited. It makes sense to counter this instrumentalist drive with a method based on collaboration, immersion, and commitment that weaves together the creators of images and their environment, and does not turn them into mere agents at the service of that machine. However, there is a danger that this measure alone will be insufficient and reversible, unless it is accompanied by a radical critique of the notion of vision that has prevailed in the dominant global culture: if we do not consider vision’s capacity to extract but also to involve and project, if we do not deconstruct the visual language that implements the colonisation of time and of perception....

We normally associate images with vision, but in the society of global capitalism the use of images as spectacle (2) has turned vision into a kind of blindness, creating an imaginary woven from a huge number of images that are renewed and also replicated unceasingly. A tissue that solidifies until it forms a dense veil of images that not only hinders vision and obstructs direct experience, but also tends to colonise our realities and dreams, while plundering deposits of fantasy (3) and personal or shared imaginaries. A dominant reality that threatens the fabric of other realities, that threatens to wipe out forms of knowledge, landscapes, people, ways of life, affects... As if a thousand libraries of Alexandria, still embedded in people’s daily lives, in their chores, their places, were already burning once again.

Much has been said about the manipulative nature of media images, their capacity to deflect, distort, and distract the senses, creating a vision of reality that is completely biased on favour of the big economic powers. A huge, seemingly diverse, audio-visual production machine, in the hands of a few private, government, or hybrid corporations. But the real power of these images does not lie in denying, coercing, or manipulating (which always generate resistance and thus opposition), but in claiming to build, to constitute, to give space and make meaning. In other words, to create an imaginary and offer a place, an individual or creative role in that master film that will then be projected under the heading of “reality”. Of course it is no more real than a theme park or a shopping mall that simulates town squares, street musicians, and even action scenes...

This spectacle-reality is forged in the constant, high centrifugation of labels: news, fiction, advertising, education, entertainment, training, and so on. Themes and concepts are mixed together, and so is the syntax of consumption, permutating them in time and space until they become indistinguishable or their differences become irrelevant, once they are consumed and absorbed as part of the same segment of experience.

Audio-visual media have undergone radical change and hybridisation under the impetus of the new consumer, entertainment, and socialisation technologies. They have partly yielded the oligopoly of the means of audio-visual production, and are now complemented (and challenged) by the massive spread of devices for recording, editing, and disseminating images. They have hybridised with other media based on micro-segments of information and opinion..., creating a dense media ambience in which TV news, advertising, video games, film, advertorials, and social media are constantly in self-referential mode. Inspired by marketing strategies and informed by the personal information that is “voluntarily” provided on so-called social networks, critical voices also take on a spectacle-role. An implementation of a new version of the panopticon, given that any “social” element of these networks dissolves with the ownership, management, and use of the data they amass.

Models are no longer simply projected onto passive viewers, like in the old Hollywood dream factory. Instead, what were formerly audiences are offered an “opportunity to participate”, a chance for interaction that gives them an active leading role in a pre-written script. Stories, feelings, private and shared dramas, aspirations, desires, dreams, fears, likes and dislikes, emotions and ideas, are the raw material that fuels the great accumulation machine, always geared towards obtaining and maintaining maximum profit in the form of financial or cognitive capital. In this context, as Pasolini saw, free participation and interaction paradoxically coexists with looting and plunder, with the exploitation of the enormous experiential and cultural reservoirs, the personal and collective realities of those who participate, whose reality either becomes productive or is cancelled. The “raw material” is used according to the financial logic of marketing and the politics of control. It is extracted, inserted into the timeline (4), filtered, and put back on screen in the form of the global imaginary.

The dominant power presents itself in an outward-oriented imaginary, but this does not mean that it is only used on forms and surfaces. Rather, it provokes and forces the interior – anonymous, hidden, insignificant – to flow towards the surface, to be reduced to it, to show and advertise itself and ultimately become only that outwardness. Only thus can it be mapped in its entirety, its identities grouped and produced, experts assigned, and goods targeted to it.

The sleep of our era is not a good sleep that provides rest. It’s an anxious sleep that leaves you feeling even more worn out (...) There is a narcosis that begs for an even deeper narcosis . (5)

This is the sleep that gives rise to “capitalist realism” (6), which mainly affects people living in the central parts of the global system, where capitalism tends to seem unfair but unavoidable, with no conceivable alternative. Mark Fisher, who coined the term, describes it as the impossibility of there being space for an alternate possibility within a capitalist framework.

Capitalist realism cannot be confined to art or the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action. (7)

Capitalist realism, implemented as a hegemonic ideology, consists of the conviction that there is no alternative to the paradigm of capitalist social organisation, and also of its own means of reproduction and dissemination to most of the population.

As we have seen, the image industry and the media are essential for projecting this capitalist realism onto the social screen. Two of its media strategies are notable for their capacity to go viral.

The first, presented as “information” and “objectivity”, consists of what we could call the creation and export of the visual concept of poverty. Through images (preferably taken from countries on the global periphery), news and mainstream documentaries present decontextualised, re-situated visual segments that illustrate the dominant idea of poverty for “central” audiences and export it as a global imaginary. At the same time