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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


news

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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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)

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

 

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Transpeninsular2018

Transpenisular: Lois Patiño and Valentina Pelayo


Series of oil paintings, and a video installation, no sound, (loop)


Curated by Bernardo Sopelana

Instituto de México en Madrid, España


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.

 

 

  1. FOUCAULT, MICHEL. “OF OTHER SPACES.”.
  2. LIMINALITY IS CONCEPT FIRST DEVELOPED BY ARNOLD VAN GENNEP AND FURTHER EXPLORED PHILOSOPHICALLY IN MY MASTER´S THESIS MIRADA A LAS FRONTERAS DE MÉXICO-ESTADOS UNIDOS (2017) ON CULTURAL THEORY AND CRITICISM AT THE UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS 111 OF MADRID.
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Untitled fabric installation2016

Mixed media canvases, 3´´ video projection no sound, (loop) in collaboration with Elsa Atilano



C113 Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, U.S.A.


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.

 

 

  1. James Benning is a world-renowned minimalist filmmaker, and faculty at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987.
  2. a fabric that is consumed from the low to high social class, and was part of the formation of Brazilian cultural identity during the Portuguese colonization.
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Arenas infinitas2014

Chaos & Cosmos: An art exhibition inspired by Borges


Sand installation and 3´ video projection, no sound, (loop)


Curated by Martin Plot and Charles Gaines

California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, C.A., U.S.A.


 

 


Neither the book nor the sand (of the desert) has any beginning or end..The line is made up 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. My body will sink for a long time and will be corrupted and dissolved in the wind generated by the fall that is infinite. 1


 


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.

 

 

  1. BORGES, JORGE LUIS. “THE BOOK OF SAND.” 1975.
  2. BORGES, JORGE LUIS. “THE LIBRARY OF BABEL.” COLLECTED FICTIONS.1941. PENGUIN, 1998. PP. 137-138.
  3. BORGES, JORGE LUIS. “THE LOTTERY OF BABYLON.” COLLECTED FICTIONS.1941. PENGUIN, 1998. PP. 129..
  4. BORGES, JORGE LUIS. “THE IMMORTAL.” THE ALEPH. 1949.
  5. BORGES, JORGE LUIS. “THE BOOK OF SAND.” 1975. P.506.
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Eutopia2012


Coccon designed in collaboration and woven by Elsa Atilano


Gallery of The Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles, C.A., U.S.A.