Item 0011 - Impressions from Peyote Road

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ES OVNI CTX-S013-SS002-0011

Title

Impressions from Peyote Road

Date(s)

  • 2009 (Accumulation)

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Video

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Lance Henson, a Cheyenne poet who lives in Italy, returns to the US every year for poetry readings and to renew links with his tribe. This year he travels by car through native territories, where Peyote medicine heals and helps people to conduce their lives. He travels from the Cheyenne reservation at Concho, Oklahoma to the Conchos river in the Tarahumara Hills in Mexico. Lance writes a journey diary during the trip which includes Peyote Songs and poems.

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copyright. Disponible online

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copyright. Permisos: premsa, catàleg

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  • English

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    Castellano

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    images/posters/2851_0610_impressions_from_peyote_road_SUBCAST.jpg

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    Publication note

    2009: Rizomas - 27 de Mayo de 2009

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    Note

    I read Antonin Artaud’s book “The Tarahumara” in my adolescent age. In this book the French poet declares he made a trip to Mexico seeking the magic that Europe had lost. Soon I started several trips to Tiahuanaco (Bolivia), Machu Pichu (Peru), and Teotihuacan (Mexico), experiences that helped me understand that native Americans were not just magnificent ruins and museum pieces, but alive contemporary cultures whose cosmologies and mythological recreations were still also alive. As a movie director I started my job with the documentary film “Carnival”, made in 1997, about the indigenous celebration in Jujuy, north of Argentina. Further on, i worked on a research about the peyote cult in Mexico, with the traditional Tarahumara healer Gabino Flores. In 2004 I had an encounter in Barcelona Spain with Francisco Cabanzo who is making a PhD research about landscape patterns and archetypes in Lance Henson´s Poetry. I met the Cheyenne poet Lance Henson, and soon understood that he could be a way to get into the mysterious world of peyote. Therefore, in 2005 we conceived Peyote Road project, and Lance accepted participating to make through it a tribute to peyote medicine. I did a Master in Creative Documentary at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona Spain (2006/2007), where I developed the Peyote Road project with European producers and filmmakers. In 2006 i recorded a poetry tour through Italy “Words from the edge”, a tour with three native american poets including Lance Henson. This short documentary was selected at the 32nd American Indian Film Festival, 2007 San Francisco USA. I would really like to make this documentary because I have been working on it for many years now, doing field research on peyote sacred practices and studying documentary film language. I consider Impressions from Peyote Road an ideal project to be developed as a documentary work because it includes several audio-visual elements capable of being represented through video and film supports – poetry and music in peyote songs, dances, paintings, gestures that belong to transcendental arts in ritual performances. Peyote ritual can induces “trance” deep experience, but cinema can also result to cause ecstasy experiences in certain way. I would like to make audience live this kind of hypnotic experience through brief documentary fragments using some elements which belong exclusively to the cinematic medium -the use of the photogram as a time unit (flicker or stop motion), overimpressions, loops, rephotography etc. I am interested in theses analogies between peyote ritual trance and the audiovisual experience because it allows me for a while to evade conventional structures towards a more experimental field. I also want the viewer to realize the politic dimension of these ancient practices. Using religious and curative ceremonies, like the peyote rituals, the Native American people keep on building their identity through time, challenging the aculturization process (racism, disease, migration, drugs, lost of traditional language and territories, etc). Through contemporary audio-visual languages and experimental treatment, themes normally left aside, like religious rituals or poetry can become interesting to young people. On the other side I still believe occident has still a lot to learn from the way in which American native people still relate with their environment and particularly through the use of knowledge plants and traditional medicine. Hallucinogenic and synthetic drugs with psychoactive substances have become an evasive and alienating way in which many occidental people escape from the complex stressing conditions of contemporary life, the same way alcohol does for native people. For native Americans, the use of these “sacred drugs” define an alternative way of rapport with them defined by strict traditional rules inscribed in healing and spiritual purposes only, which instead of avoiding reality helps getting deeply into it.

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    https://www.facebook.com/federico.lanchares master fatal te 20 minuts de barres https://www.facebook.com/francisco.cabanzo, va publicar aixó - octubre 2022 Buenos días, les comparto los enlaces a la entrevista y al libro digital Peyo

    Note

    Proyecciones: 1 (2009) — Rizomas

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    impressions-from-peyote-road

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    Language(s)

    • Catalan

    Script(s)

    • Latin

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