LOOP city Screen at Metàfora
On the 22nd of November Metàfora screened the work of advanced level students Karen Torres and Charlotte Nordgren Sewell. The screening was arranged within the context of LOOP City Screen a festival of video art all around Barcelona.
Galleries, artistic venues, organizations and collectives join LOOP Festival scheduling exhibitions, curatorial programs and special projects that complement the agenda of the contemporary video creation.
“Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure of the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.”
Barbara Deming, Prisons That Could Not Hold.
Charlotte Nordgren Sewell’s piece is “Melting Gold”, a video honing in on the opulent aesthetic of gold in order to speak about how the unbounded beauty of this precious metal serves to obscure its violent extraction process. In this short film, an ancestral oral history comes alive to tell us of the reappropriation of gold for the benefit of a local community in Mexico a century ago. The video reminds us of the continued colonial frameworks of power in action globally, as it scans slowly around the luxurious interior of Barcelona cathedral.
Karen Torres piece is a claim for visibility of one of Mexico’s worst tragedies, the disappearance of thousands of women every year. “Erica I” is a projection on a Spark Chevrolet car door model 2010 metallic pink. The video tells the painful and endless story through which the relatives of the disappeared pass. Erika has been missing for almost 5 years, she left driving to her destination and never arrived. Four days later the last thing that was learned about her was her Spark car painted white and abandoned. Violence afterlives is the thread tying both videos together.
