The Loop festival addresses the ecosystem and memory recovery

The Barcelona video art festival will unfold in a network that includes spaces such as the Picasso Museum, the Frederic Marès Museum or the Joan Miró, Vila Casas, Enric Miralles and Cultural CdR foundations. All of them will articulate for ten days an agenda in collaboration with the contest. In parallel, a network of thirty-five galleries and independent art spaces will be linked to LOOP with the City Screen program. In 58 spaces in Barcelona, the event will offer a poster with exhibitions, screenings and performances made by 38 curators.

The crisis of the ecosystem and the recovery of memory are the main themes of the new edition which will feature renowned names such as the filmmakers José Val del Omar and João Pedro Rodrigues, the Chilean creator Lotty Rosenfeld or the Chinese artist Tao today One of the highlights will be a dialogue between the Val del Omar and Hui installations with the collections at the Frederic Marès Museum and the Picasso. anoxia A constant prelude, an opera in three acts by Fito Conesa, will inaugurate the Loop.

As the artistic director of LOOP Festival 2023, Victoria Sacco, explained in a press conference, the new edition of the festival is marked by social awareness and, for this reason, many of the works propose a committed and uncomfortable look at the global context that surrounds us

The visual artist Fito Conesa, winner of the ninth edition of the Video Creation Award, will be in charge of opening the festival with the audiovisual piece Anòxia. A constant prelude. It is a song about the degeneration of the Mediterranean in the form of operas in three acts. The co-production will be joined by his performance site specific Naumaquia choral, a sound action composed by the artist with the singer Claudia Schneider. Finally, DJ La Niña Jacarandá will present her project Sexpiritual, premiered at Sónar 2023.

The crisis of our ecosystems caused by human action is also the subject of Deixar-te corrê (2021, 20 min), the first essay by the artist Anna Dot for the elaboration of a legislative proposal that defends the recognition of the legal personality of the Ter. The video travels through different sections of the river course in parallel with the voice that reads the elaborated legislative proposal. The work, which can be visited at the Fundació Vila Casas - Espais Volart, dialogues in the same center with the retrospective exhibition From beyond time, by Fina Miralles, a pioneer of conceptual art in Catalonia who also explores the landscape.

At the MACBA you can see Encanteris sobre la terra, a program of seven short videos made by American artists (Elena Damiani, Colectivo los Ingrávidos, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Ana Vaz, Paul Kos, Minia Biabiany, Camilo Echeverri) that highlights the transcendental humanity's relationship with the earth.

Deixar-te córrer, d'Anna Dot (Fundació Vila casas - Espais Volart)

The same museum will inaugurate the first retrospective exhibition of Daniel Steegmann, A leaf in the eye's place. For its part, the MNAC will offer Homeland by Mabel Palacín, a film born from a photograph; the La Capella Art Center, with The impersonal verb and the hidden subject, curated by Index Foundation, and The Stone Monkey, by Carolina Bonfill; and the Tàpies Foundation, will discover Roman Ondak's exhibition. Infinitum.

At Casa Elisalde you can see The Machine and the Flower, by Pau Faus, and We Are Here, by Camila Flores-Fernández. The projects put an end to the European initiative A-Place Linking Places through Networked Artistic Practices.

Faus's work is one of the works that invite reflection on the impact of technology on our daily lives. Faus collects the reflections of the philosopher Juan Arnau, astrophysicist and specialist in Eastern cultures, and staunch defender of humanism in the era of technological distraction, in two very different settings: the interior and exterior of the Alba Synchrotron.

The sixth edition of the documentary program Comme ça va? will propose the screening on November 18 of Onde fica esta rua? ou Sem antes nem depois (2022), by filmmakers João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata. The film revisits the emblematic locations and themes of the foundational film of the new Portuguese cinema, Los años verdes' directed in 1963 by Paulo Rocha, Rodrigues' mentor.

Also on November 19 will be the premiere in Catalonia of Transfariana (2023), by Joris Lachaise, one of the outstanding examples of current video art in struggle. The documentary narrates the unexpected love between an ex-trans sex worker and an ex-guerrilla of the FARC in La Picota, a high-security prison in the south of Bogotá. The provocative documentary began its journey at the Berlinale and was recognized at the San Sebastián Film Festival with the Sebastiane Latino Award.

The recovery of historical memory is one of the prominent thematic axes of the 21st edition. For this reason, as part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état in Chile, on November 24th LOOP will show at Casa América de Catalunya Me niego, a program of six historical works made on video between 1979 and 1989 by Lotty Rosenfeld .

Hacer una diagonal con la música, d’Aura Satz (Exposició Attuning, Museu de la Música de Barcelona)

The Loop will also offer a look at emerging talent with exhibitions such as D un rastre com un tallo, at the Convent of Sant Agustí. The curators Eva Paià and Marina Ribot Pallicer relate here the pieces of five young artists - Judith Adataberna, Imagen Ensayo, Mar Guerrero, Rio Molinengo and Pantea -, exploring historical, collective and personal memory.

You will be able to see how the Taiwanese artist Che-Yu Hsu has created the Zoo Hypothesis series, thanks to the Video Art Production Grant of the Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Barcelona 2020, in collaboration with the Joan Miró Foundation. The work reviews historical events in his country during the Second World War that mark the construction of personal and collective memories. Through a video shot in a taxidermist studio, a screenwriter and an actor discuss the mass execution of animals in a zoo during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan.

The female leaders of electroacoustic music will have their space with Attuning, an exhibition at the Barcelona Music Museum curated by Carolina Jiménez, in which the artist portrays a series of relevant composers in the development of electroacoustic music.

Examples are Oramics: Atlantis Anew (2011, 7'22"), conceived as a tribute to Daphne Oram; Little Doorways to Paths Not Yet Taken, (2016, 7'32''), an intimate profile of the studio of American composer Laurie Spiegel and Hacer una diagonal con la música (2019, 10'22''), with the composer Beatriz Ferreyra, promoter, together with Pierre Schaeffer, of concrete music. Attuning will also have a listening session at the Filmoteca de Catalunya of two of his telephone-sound compositions: Dial Tone Dron (2014) and Tone Transmissions (2020).

One of the last outstanding proposals will be the premiere of Juana Dolores Dear ChatGPT's video performance in the Casa Seat auditorium. Through interaction with the artificial intelligence bot application developed in 2022 by OpenAI and starting from the historic SEAT Strike of 1971 in Barcelona's Zona Franca, it will explore the ideologization of AI as a response to interests of capitalism.

Finally, LOOP's first collaboration with Manifesta 15 Barcelona will allow the screening of One Hundred Steps (2020, 30'), the eighth film by Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin, on November 16, at the former headquarters of the Gustavo Gili Publishing House de Burca, authors of a practice that hybridizes documentary and fiction with musical interpretation to delve deeper into the socio-political, historical and geographical layers of hidden and marginalized histories, from Brazil to Canada and Germany. His latest film, shot during the pandemic and premiered at the Berlinale, is based on the Irish filmmaker Bob Quinn.