frame after experience

SANTIAGO SEPULVEDA / LA ISLA BONITA

​Santiago Sepúlveda is a transdisciplinary artist and teacher based in Bogotá, Colombia. His practice is marked by an interdisciplinary approach which looks at the overlap between theatre, performance and live art. He has developed a technique called cine vivo (live cinema), in which moving images and bodies on the stage enter a symbiotic relationship. By creating tension between the physical presence of the bodies and the projected realities in the images, Santiago explores the complexity of cultural contrasts and the variety of forms in which we inhabit our reality.

In making La Isla Bonita, una acción cinematica (The Beautiful Island, A cinematic action), Santiago undertook an in-depth documentation of life in the Proas Building, a middle-class apartment building in Bogotá. The research comprised his own observational films and years of logbook entries by the numerous superintendents that had worked in the building. He juxtaposed this with audio excerpts in Hungarian taken from the film Werckmeister Harmonies by Béla Tarr, an artist he admires deeply for his approach to framing in his films.

Here, Santiago shares with DRAFF some of the materials from the research process for La Isla Bonita. 
Map for the assembly of scenes in the film element of the show.
An audio piece by Kaboom Karavan that helped me to understand the rhythm for the first scene of the project.
This wall contains all the working materials. Visuals help me to think about the montage/assembly.
Photos taken in the Proas Building lobby. Experimentation with one of the superintendents in the building.
This is the living room in apartment 502 of the Proas Building. The entire project was conceived here. Here we see a performative exercise, with a cow’s tongue inserted in the mouth.
Gilles Deleuze. What is a creative act? My partner in crime along the way.
Research material laid out on the working table.
Research in the space, with screens and an 8mm projector.
Painting found in a room in Proas. Unknown author. Inspirational image. The birds/the sea/the tree/the ship.
An exercise on editing a text sourced from the personal diary of Juan Guinés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573), a Spanish Renaissance philosopher and proponent of colonial slavery. In this, Letter 53, he explains why the war against American natives is justified.
Record of the view from a room in apartment 52 in the Proas building. ‘Nemqueteba’ is a God from the Muisca mythology. Muiscas were one of the main indigenous pre-hispanic civilisations, on a par with the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas.
Taken in a room in the Proas building. This avocado plant’s soundtrack is a narration on Fernando XII by Colombian historian Diana Uribe.
Inspiration image. Medieval copyist. Here I’m observing the connection between the copyist and the superintendent, who records his notes in a book called ‘La munuta’.
This is the opening letter in an epistolary exchange with my partner Ana Maria Gómez. In these letters I explore the dislocation that occurs when a narration in Hungarian is subtitled with mismatching words in Spanish. These letters refer to the movie Werckmeister Harmonies by Béla Tarr.
Screenshot from a video taken in the living room of apartment 502 in the Proas Building. Here I have deployed the materials for the project. I decided to conduct a conversation with myself, taking turns on each chair, in order to clarify where the project was heading to and where my interest lay.
Performative application/exercise via an online erotic chatroom in which the user, Sepúlveda, chats with words borrowed from Letter 53 by Juan Guines de Sepúlveda. 
La Isla Bonita, una acción cinematica plays as part of Festival SÂLMON on the 23rd February, at Graner, Barcelona.

Posted: 23.02.18