Valentina Pelayo Atilano

Homeostasis2024

Homeostasis: Valentina Pelayo, Alejandro Lopart, Nika Koplatadze, Olya Dubatova

¨Los Amantes¨ Video Projection (loop), 2´31, 16mm. Oil and golden leafs on canvas, 120 x 120 cm (big painting) 31 x 23 cm (small paintings)

"Bodet 32", Santa María la Ribera, CDMX, México

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Valentina Pelayo’s new body of work harnesses intimacy to delve into experiences that take place in our beds, but are seldom openly talked or even thought about. Her paintings shown in this space depict bed sheets, her bed sheets. Though the everyday, domestic character of these household objects is relevant, her work treats bed sheets like the skin of the quintessential site for dreaming, lovemaking and greeting of death. My Bed attempts to communicate in the elusive languages of affect and memory, written with the folds of bed sheets. As such, the encounter of these paintings is an encounter with absence. We have to ask ourselves: what is left of our dreams when we wake?

True to her interdisciplinary practice, Pelayo disturbs the purely retinal experience of gazing at the paintings by incorporating concepts and techniques from her work in film. Each painting is based on footage of Pelayo’s bed taken on several occasions throughout this past year. By modifying the exposure of the film throughout a “scene”, she gets several stills of differing look which she then translates onto canvas. Within singular canvases she layers several “frames” as a way of introducing time into her paintings, a notion that carries a sense of impermanence associated with human experiences such as love. But what if we could see footage of Pelayo’s bed instead of its painted traces? Would the conceptual and affective predominance of absence and loss be mitigated through a filmic representation of the bed, considering that the truthfulness of photographic representations is more readily acceptable than that of painting?

Pelayo’s short film, Los amantes, uses the documentary quality of the film image to deepen her engagement with absence and loss. In the short film, Pelayo reads in voice over the poem “A cama” from LexIcon by Portuguese poet Salette Tavares, that served as inspiration to engage creatively with the topic of her bed. As she reads, a series of rapid cuts make us understand that the objects that appear on her bed remit to memories only accessible through dreaming. Shots of seashells strewn about her bed are followed by shots of Pelayo at the seashore, but contrasts between images and asynchronous sounds disrupt the direct representational quality of the video. The film is better understood as a documentary of Pelayo’s effort to give a realistic depiction of feelings and absences whose very nature makes them elusive subjects for representation.

(Roberto A. Rochin)

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Beyond Streams of Silence2023

Four large scale oil paintings, two video projections of "Trazos de silencio" (Streams of Silence), 28´ (loop), and a live performance in collaboration with Bernardo Feldman

Commissioned by CalArts as part of its Happenings Exhibition, within the scope of the Institute’s 50th Anniversary Celebration

E28 Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, U.S.A.

The exhibition is presented as a multimedia, performative, and immersive installation that grows out of the film Streams of Silence (Trazos de silencio, 2022). The paintings were produced during the shooting of the film, inspiring the color palette of the film. Within the exhibition space, the static paintings contrast with the moving image, making the presence of light a component that fuses these opposite elements. The performative aspect of the installation is conformed by the filmmaker narrating the original voiceover texts of the film in English in the opposite chronical order than in the film. Bernardo Feldman, the original composer of the film’s score, intervenes by playing diverse instruments such as Teponaztli, a type of slit drum used in central Mexico by the Aztecs, and various kinds of prehispanic flutes.

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Beyond Streams of Silence invite

Happenings Pamphlet

Trazos de silencio2022

28´ • 16mm, 35mm, HD • México, Spain, Portugal

Synopsis

Resembling a constellation of ideas and sentiments of a (still) wounded land, the filmmaker’s taxi ride through Mexico City is interwoven by fragments from Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, exposing echoes of violence and that which remains unsaid, silenced.

Statement

Before starting to work with the moving image, I was trained in painting and compile my practice in abstract painting. The physical representation of people doesn’t interest me as subjects of aesthetic exploration. I am rather interested in their gestures, body traces and textures. Mexico was and continues to be a mutilated nation. After living in Los Angeles for sixteen years, I returned to Mexico at the age of 26. I delved in depth into its pre-Hispanic history, as a way to understand and cope with my new context. I came across texts, including Nezahualcóyotl’s Percibo lo secreto (I Perceive Secret Things), and Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, which portrayed the valley of Mexico before its colonization. Trazos de silencio aims to contrast the alluring beauty of the landscape with the ongoing trauma of colonialism and with the vulnerability I felt when I returned. I embraced monarch butterflies into this constellation of imagery given their remarkable ability to withstand the adversities of migration.

Awards

Special Mention | Latin American Short Film Competition

FicValdivia International Film Festival. Chile (2022)

Special Mention | Mexican Documentary Shorts Competition

Morelia International Film Festival. Mexico (2022)

Festivals & Alternative Screenings

FICUNAM International Film Festival. Mexico (2022)

Curtas Vila Do Conde International Film Festival. Portugal (2022)

SHORTS MEXICO International Shorts Film Festival. Mexico (2022)

Frontera Sur International Non-Fiction Film Festival. Chile (2022)

FIFEQ International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec. Canada (2023)

Philadelphia Latino Film Festival. United States (2023)