Theorems from Within the Pool
This short film was commissioned by Rencontres International de la Photographies, Arles 1996. It responded to the theme of dreams around the work of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It is made from slides.
www.rencontres-arles.com/en/mediatheque…
Please go to min. 18:40
The work is framed by the concept of orilla (shore), in its sense of limit in constant transformation, like the shores of the earth where it meets a river or the sea.
From this notion, the film flows between reality and fiction, between dream and wakefulness.
With the sole intention of continuing to navigate, it also questions other limits:
the origins of violence, the relationship between conqueror and conquered,
the fate of the mosquito in the drop of amber and its transformation into a souvenir.
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A commission for a spectacle.
A French spectacle for a French and international audience.
And me, meanwhile, during the summer, doing nothing but reading Guy Debord.
He and his idea of the spectacle.
.....
Borges. Borges Buenos Aires. Borges Argentina. Borges gaucho milonga tango.
Borges humidity. Borges English.
Borges and the medialuna or Borges and the scone?
The zoo as a place where conquests are displayed (John Berger, About Looking).
The turtle is time: mythological, relative, subjective, real...
Trees, like statues, also speak of time. And of the history of Buenos Aires’ urbanization.
Of memory as a mental mechanism, and of memory as construct —personal, collective— of past ideations.
Of memory as the absence of forgetting.
TV as an importer of informative images from a congested reality.
The rain. The evocative rain in Buenos Aires.
The kidnapping. A recurring sequence in history.
The TV as library. The TV as the source of all knowledge and information.
[is it possible today to imagine oneself without TV?]
Chuang-Tzu is everything and nothing, he is dream and he is real, he is now and he is forever…
“the days, and none was the first…”
Today my grandmother told me that she stopped reading newspapers when my grandfather died sixteen years ago.
Since then, every morning when she gets up, she looks at the cypress through the window and knows everything:
the news from around the world, the weather forecast, the TV schedule, the temperature.
The turtle too became one of the disappeared.
A disappeared person, kidnapped and thrown into the river from a helicopter. —sic Scilingo—
The turtle, mythological animal that represents different ways of perceiving time.
The helicopter as an animal destined for control and repression.
[the time dimension is perceived in the body, with the body].
Cordoba~Buenos Aires, 1996