The image of Punto de Vista 2025

This proposal for the 2025 Punto de Vista posters defines the festival as a meeting space: a place inhabited by different communities sharing the same experience of attending a film screening.

While looking for visual references that might resonate somehow with this experience, I found three photographs of a solar eclipse in Pamplona dated 1900 and 1901. Two of them were direct photographs of the eclipse taken by the same photographer. They were both labelled with technical details about the moment they were taken. On one of them, it was possible to read “Exposure: 1 second, at 3:54 in the afternoon; at the moment of apparent magnitude.” The third was a group portrait of several people observing an eclipse outside the doors of a psychiatric hospital. Almost at the same time, they are all holding a small mirror in which some are observing and capturing the phenomenon. A few others are looking at the camera.

I review the three photographs. I think about the place we occupy in the world with regard to the things that correspond to an unknown, unpredictable and, at times, imperceptible natural order. I look again. I find a satellite photograph of a solar storm. It belongs to NASA. I photocopy it. The original image is coloured in the way the sun is usually represented: oranges, yellows and reds. 

With these ideas and images in my mind, I create a series of three collages centred around the idea of movement and the sun as a phenomenon that brings us together, unites us and intrigues us in equal parts. I choose to somehow return its natural colour to the sun, the sum of all colours: white. This time, the colours provide the elements and shapes that frame it, surround it and cover it.

The pieces of paper are not fixed to one another; they move in a random fashion for each scan, meaning it is impossible to reproduce exactly the same composition each time it is rotated or moved. Each collage has the spirit of something that happens ephemerally and unrepeatably. They are unique in each and every one of their different versions. They respond to a living format, a format in motion.

 

Magdalena Orellana (author of the image for the 19th Punto de Vista Festival)