Permanence of the ephemeral

Today, humanity portrays itself and records the world around it every day. It produces an audiovisual record of society and everyday life so immense that its boundaries are ungraspable. It is a digital record, uneven, amorphous and extremely chaotic, where the banal and the significant constantly intersect. Where standardised formats do not prevent a multitude of unforeseen expressions from emerging. It is a rapid, volatile inscription, ephemeral and raw, often unaware of being a record.

Filmmakers today find themselves surrounded by an infinite ocean of images created by others, from which questions emerge that barely existed 20 years ago. Questions that are fundamental for documentary practices due to the intense relationship between these images and the representation of reality. How can citizens be represented if so many of them are already representing themselves? Where should a filmmaker position themselves if “everyone” is filming? What relationship has been forged between cinema and amateur audiovisual language? What does this immense archive of the present mean for documentary cinema?

The Permanencia de lo efímero programme is made up of filmmakers and artists who have grappled with these contemporary paradigms, navigating and re-editing the amateur archive of social media, renewing the history of appropriation cinema. Archive films born from the internet, emerging from immersion in its molten depths, from the selection, reordering and intervention of its fragments, from the discovery of connections, patterns, common threads and collective identities. Works that have salvaged images of an ephemeral nature, granting them permanence, transforming their fleeting status into a memory of the present.

Miquel Martí Freixas