2018 saw the inception of DOKBIZIA, an interdisciplinary encounter which aims to create a crossroads between languages and artists that work with and around what is real. This programme, which deals with the documentary on and off the screen, provides a tour through different formats: screenings, performative lectures, staged and site-specific pieces and performances.
“The sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.” — Yukio Mishima.
Lois Patiño and Xabier Erkizia are currently working together on various projects that explore the expressive possibilities of sound and image beyond the conventions of cinema. The chance to explore the space of the planetarium stands as the perfect opportunity to cross these limits. During the session, we will be able to witness different trials that they are conducting for two projects: Samsara, which works around the idea of the Buddhist cycle of death and rebirth; and El sembrador de estrellas, which proposes a contemplative experience of the city of Tokyo at night.
What you will hear is one side of a forthcoming LP, The Works and Days: The Black Sections, that emerged out of the film, The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin). The film is the second feature of C.W. Winter and Anders Edström—an eight-hour geographic fiction shot over a period of fourteen months in a mountain village in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. The album is a re-edited sound collage from the film’s production material featuring musical excerpts from Tim Berne & Bill Frisell, Tony Conrad, Graham Lambkin, Mary Jane Leach, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Folke Rabe, Éliane Radigue, and Akio Suzuki.
“Beyond the reading styles contained within each period and the texts that are read within them; and beyond the scores that poems constitute for reading aloud and silently, what is the difference between reading a poem and reading a poem not? I have always thought that the differences (pauses, tones) were highly fragile and that all the calibrations that poetry transmits between the spoken word and the recited, and later between the recited and the spoken word, are also poetry. With this piece I want to make performing poetry reading simpler to showcase the poems in Salitre, a book written in the dream-storytelling language”.
“Very early, we will follow a route lasting various hours, covering the spaces generated between the Retrato de un gudari llamado Odiseo, in the Citadel, to the Alzuza Fountain by the sculptor, Jorge Oteiza. A kind of collective action that forms part of the El final de un vacío es el principio de otro project, created for the Oteiza Museum. I propose the Oteiza vacuity as a work matter, but not that generated between the elements of a sculptor, but rather between two of his sculptures. This takes me to poetically active spaces of fifty centimetres in length, but also to imaginary sculptures of seven thousand kilometres. It is a kind of start of delirious work that takes me to connect the void with elements that are more akin to my work, such as walking, cartography, provoking situations and the narrative, thinking at the shared root of the vacuity with terms such as vague, vacations and vagabond”. — Fermín Jiménez Landa
“This work, created for the Encontros do DeVIR Festival, was developed around the process of desertification/dehumanisation of the Caldeirão Mountain, in the interior of Algarve (south of Portugal). I filmed at the mountain and I also incorporated images of mine in the piece but I mostly used Michel Giacometti’s films, especially the recordings of work songs. With this “broad picture” of the Caldeirão highlanders I address in this piece all the different people that possess a knowledge that we have lost, a knowledge on the link between body and spirit, between ordinary life and art. A knowledge that we can (and should, for our own good) retrieve. My dance at the end, with my precious cork trunk, is my tribute to this knowledge.” —Vera Mantero.
An amateur writer, also called Oier Etxeberria, writes a film script for the post-Jesuit priest Padre Laburu. This film takes place in a future-past in which the Basilica of Loyola and a good part of the world have been subsumed by the Adder of Wills, an artefact that Laburu designed for El Pedigree, his friend, Ricardo Baroja’s science fiction theatre play. Without revealing the plot or the end of the film, this presentation will give viewers a better understanding of this optical machine known for its capacity to project anthropological models (living beings) and not mere representations.