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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.

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)

California Instite of the Arts´s "Happenings Exhibition". United States (2023)

Marienbad Film Festiva. Czech Republic (2023)

Programa "Paisagems Políticas". Galeria Zé Dois Bois. Portugal (2023)

Programa "Erupciones". Centro de Cultura Digital. México (2023)

Yale University, The Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale. United States (2023)

The University of Texas at Austin, College of Liberal Arts. United States (2024)

Labs

Arché Doc • Doclisboa. Portugal (2020)
Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola -Finalization of the short film-. Spain (2021) 

Credits

Director, Screenwriter, Producer, Director of Photography, Editing

Valentina Pelayo Atilano

Sound

Anuar Yahya

Sound Designers

Miguel Martins

Miguel Diogo

Bernardo Feldman

Valentina Pelayo Atilano

Cast

Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez

Valentina Pelayo Atilano

Other links 

OFFICIAL WEBSITE

KINO REBELDE (Distribution): distribution@kinorebelde.com

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell at the sea's furthest end, even there your hand would lead me, your right hand hold me fast.

                                                                           Psalm 138, 8-12.

This psalm interlaces my encounter with Baja California Sur, expressed through this series of work. Its alienation shapes ambiguity and fluidity, revealing an autonomous non-space and described in Michel Foucault's essay "Of Other spaces"¹ as a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal, where its twilight light runs like water, and its journey is captured and fixed on the canvas of its skies. One of the definitions of a path: the action of traversing the space between two points. I used my multiculturalism as inspiration to move between these points that revolve around the idea of liminality; a notion first proposed by Arnold Van Gennep and later taken up by Víctor Turner that alludes to the state of openness and ambiguity that characterizes the intermediate phase of a tripartite time-space, whose entity attributes are neither here nor there, but rather at a point that unites one side with the other, the look from within with the outside world, invisibility with visibility, terrestrial vision with air. With this greater understanding, through this experience, I found the freedom to convey my perception, influenced by something deeper: the complexity of self-identification in this common space, inhabited by degradation and the stratifications that fly over the schemes imposed by sovereignty in a real time state.

James Benning¹ opened an interrogation of the usage of light within Untitled Fabric Installation, as he walked into the exhibit and asked; “Did you make these!? They are gorgeous, you were just lazy with the lights of the room!” The installation is layered with stitching, painting, and a video projection. As the space’s lights were turned on and off, the viewer would either see the hung fabrics on the wall or the video projection, but not both simultaneously. The iconic Brazilian chita² fabrics, portray a series of floral prints in bold colors. Before the fabrics were cut to make the pieces, I documented each individually with my camera. These images evolved into the 30’’ video which was projected on loop directly onto one of the physical compositions. The video exposed my hand browsing through each of the fabric’s pieces, referencing rhythm within a routine. An additional layer formed by light and duration, contrasted with the staticity of the pieces and brought forth an additional dimension. To break the repetition within the patterns of the fabrics I integrated my mother’s hand stitched pieces into the differently patterned fabrics, then painted phosphorescent thin lines on top of and across the compositions. The subtle distortions within the work can only be noticed by coming very near to the works and paying close attention to their details, thus challenging and playing with the viewer’s perception and inviting him/her to actually observe the work rather than just glance at it.

Through reading Borges' short stories, the notion of infinity drew my attention. Infinity is clearly present in Borges's imagination and embraced through his stories. After reading these excerpts from his story "The Library of Babel", the image of a suspended body in space made me reflect on my relationship with my surroundings and my miniscule physical presence within the vast universe. If space is infinite we are at any point in space. If time is infinite we are at any point in time.[…] There are impersonal Draws, with an indefinite purpose; another, that every century a grain of sand is removed (or added) from the innumerable ones that are on the beach. The consequences are sometimes terrible.3

Although sand is defined by the oxford dictionary as a "set of particles disaggregated from the rocks and accumulated on the shores of the seas, rivers or in layers of haulage lands", it continues to be a mystery to me. As Borges states, the sand, like infinity, has neither beginning nor end. After reading the stories which made me reflect on infinity, sand became the main source of inspiration for my body of work, Arenas Infinitas. Like infinity, art has no limits. The moon is the same color as the infinite sand.4

The installation consists of a glass tank filled with sand, and a video projection. Within the tank, different kinds of sands are divided by their color, naturally forming distinct sections and creating an abstract composition. The tank is on a table against the wall, and the video’s sequence that projects into the wall is of sand descending above the tank, thus, giving the illusion that it is falling into the tank. The line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane, of an infinite number of lines; the volume, of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes. 5 Through Arenas Infinitas, I aim to convey the sensation of infinity, just as Borges transmitted it to me and to remind the observer that we as humans are grains that form part of the infinity of sand.