MARÍA CAÑAS. LAUGHTER IN THE DARK

Opening: June 18, at 20:30 h.
Dates: June 19 - October 11, 2015
Space: East Cloister
Exhibition Session: Archive Sickness

In these current times of sweeping political and social change, having a suspicious attitude towards images is essential if we hope to activate our present.

This show, an instalment of the exhibition session Archive Sickness, documents a large part of my career as the "videopathic" Dame Archivist of Seville, plunderer of icons and weaver of "glocal" (global + local) narratives that swim against the tide. The bullfighter practises tauromachy, and I, as a creator, practise "videomachy", which I define as the art of combating and recycling all the "audiovisual detritus" that surrounds us.

I invite you to wander through the fascinating territories of found footage in my satirical "video-collages", which subvert and revive the virtually boundless online archive and the surplus images of the great stage that is the world. In this process of appropriation and resignification, I challenge the dominant cinema, media and fan-phenomenon discourse, while reflecting on the bizarre mixture of entertainment and alarmism, of lugubrious and sensual imagery that surrounds us, operating on the plane of iconographic cannibalism.

I think now is the time to film what no one is filming, in a place where no one films, and to make movies without cameras. I believe that the defence of raucous laughter organizes rage, and that humour of any colour is a form of grassroots resistance. My video-deliriums are on the front line of heterodoxy, the burlesque-carnivalesque spirit, the monstrous and grotesque, the "laughbellion", with no regard for convention or protocol, and they often become a provocative challenge to official rituals. They are a resistance movement against distraction, Manichaeism, the gratuitous spectacle and all that other nonsense spawned by the digital entertainment industry. I love to create terrifying leisure that makes us roar, because "the revolution will not be televised".

I propose audiovisual narratives untainted by "bunkerizing" visions of history and genres: blazing a trail through the no-man's land between experimental film and video art, documentary and essay film, life and death... I fight alongside the video guerrillas, who infiltrate stereotypes and symbols and blow them to smithereens. My video-remix challenges the hegemonic message and socio-cultural myths spread by the mass media, transforming official discourses into low-cost versions of critical culture.

I hope that some of my passion for shaking and stirring up images will rub off on you, so that we can all become freer, more creative beings. May the fire walk with you all. And, as Simon of the Desert, warned, "Be thou not burned in the fire of vain contemplation."

Is truth stranger than fiction? Or is fiction stranger than truth? Who knows... Drawing a lesson from what we have seen, adapting it to our purposes and interests, being in but not of this world, and being protean and happy—that is the essential thing, and we would be wise not to forget it.

María Cañas.

 

ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION

[Catalogue]

[Exhibitions Labels]

[Press Dossier]

[High Resolution Images]

[Photo Album on Flickr]