Presentation of videos from series BETWEEN DREAMS, Marcelo Expósito
Mostly based in Barcelona, artist and co-editor of Brumaria (www.brumaria.net) and transversal (www.transform.eipcp/transversal), Marcelo Expósito (1966) has worked during 15 years on projects and has published an amount of texts, and co-edited books, in the crossroads of art, politics, and activism.
Among his (collective) publications, "Plusvalías de la imagen" (1994) constituted a rare early intervention of institutional critique in the spanish independent video scene; "Chris Marker. Retorno a la inmemoria del cineasta" (2000) remains the only Spanish monography on the classic french filmmaker; "Historias sin argumento. El cine de Pere Portabella" (2001) deals with the confluencies of political and film avan-gardes in the spanish turmoil of the 70s; "Modos de hacer. Arte crítico, esfera pública y acción directa" (2001), attempted to link traditions in public and critical art with the then developing trends of communication guerrilla, direct action, and artivism. Recent texts like "Desobediencia: la hipótesis imaginativa" (2003), and videos like "First of May (the City-Factory)" and "Radical Imagination (Carnivals of Resistance)" (2004), attempt to grasp certain structural "creative" aspects of the last decade of (global) protests. Most recently, he has coordinated a wide research group (artists, historians, activists...) which, under the title "1969-... Algunas hipótesis de ruptura para una historia política del arte en el Estado espańol", has contributed to the general project "Desacuerdos. On art, politics, and the public sphere", supported by three main Spanish institutions. His "artistic" activity can be seen as a flux in which the "artwork" format is just one of the practical possibilities of dealing with an art-practice conceived as an ongoing and fluid combination of creativity, criticism, political practice and networking.
Marcelo Expósito screened and discussed fragments of mainly the two videos already finished in the series "Entre sueńos" (Between dreams), a series of videos dedicated to exploring the rise of the new metropolitan social movements from the 1990s forward, portrayed against the backdrop of current urban transformations and the rise of the global movement.
The first part, Primero de Mayo (la ciudad-fábrica) (First of May (the city-factory), 60 min, 2004), examines the historical relation between the modern city and industrial capitalism and the impact, exemplified by the case of Fiat-Turin, of the current changes in labor and production on the city and on its forms of life. The Italian group Chainworkers serves as a countermodel for the production of tools for the organization of labor and of metropolitan modes of life that confront the dynamics of privatization, consumption, exploitation and precarization.
For its part, the second video of the series, La imaginación radical (carnavales de resistencia) (The radical imagination (carnivals of resistance), 60 min, 2004), proposes to revisit the origins of the recent carnivalesque forms of protest, exemplified by the Global Action Day Against Capital J-18, which witnessed, on July 18, 1999, the occupation and paralysis of the City, London's financial center, by a carnival of thousands of people orquestrated by Reclaim the Streets.