Filmic Installation

“el azul de la distancia” (the blue of distance)

maría hidalgo nieto

“el azul de la distancia” is the process by which a place is made for an inheritance. On the one hand, this inheritance consists of a series of Super 8 films shot by the artist’s grandfather; on the other, it involves cinema itself as a received medium, with its inertias, conventions, and mythologies. Embracing these forms involves shifting — changing position, slowing down the narrative impulse, unfocusing the gaze, suspending frontality. Going to sleep and waking up still connected to the dream.

The title refers to a text by Rebecca Solnit about a blue, nostalgic beauty, linked to unsatisfied desire or desire in motion. It names the atmospheric phenomenon by which blue light is scattered and distant mountains appear ethereal and blue. The blue hour is also the liminal time that precedes dawn and occurs at dusk, when nocturnal and diurnal animals might cross paths. That dreamlike safety distance is the place from which the artist repositions the inherited images: an unfocused, paused space, free of frontal certainties.

Hence the need to elongate and suspend the images, to dislodge them from the cinematic train of 18 frames per second in order to offer them an expanded time, a certain contact with dreaminess. In the installation, the footage finds a physical structure built with familiar materials —tent poles and other camping elements present in the films— that suggest the shape of a house yet to be built. A simple piece of architecture, held in tension and delicate balance, capable of sheltering the poetic matter of dreams, the body, and images.

The piece is part of a broader investigation into the image and cinematic language in the context of inherited or adopted footage: a gesture of correspondence and offering that explores other ways of inhabiting cinema and sustaining a family mythology in transformation.

maría hidalgo nieto, prominent artist at the Young Art Encounters of the Navarre’s Youth Institute