As part of the curators zone, and on the occasion of the 12^th edition of the Videoarte festival in Madrid, PROYECTOR presents a selection of videos, exhibited at Le Cube – independent art room.

Entitled Viajando a utopías colectivas, this exhibition aspires to explore the notion of utopia, and the interconnectedness of the material and the ideal. It is like an exercise of paradigm shifting, in which having a firm footing in reality is not as important as it is to go beyond the imaginable, and propose new foundations on which to base one’s own logics.
This attempt to foster knowledge expansion, to transcend what may be thought and said, and to turn its delicacy into a suggested materiality, addresses an important question: how do we lead the discussion towards the intangible, the unthinkable, the unsayable?

Fernando Baena’s Vídeo del deseo, presents portraits of people of different age, race, and social condition, whose attitude in front of the camera is like that of a person in front of a wishing well. The video shows the gestures produced by the act of making a wish –desiring– as something innate, involuntary and common to all human beings.

With Stupid Borders, Rubén Martín de Lucas sets a three-steps simple exercise: taking possession of 100 m², drawing a boundary and living in it. The results are one-day microstates inhabited by just one person. The video exposes the ephemeral, artificial and transitional nature of these conventions making coexistence impossible.

Anna Gimein presents two video-performances, each one a study of a single movement, exploring both its physical complexity and the complexity of their possible meanings and motivations.
An Exercise focuses on genuflection, a gesture that requires touching one or both knees to the ground. Quite difficult for the human body to execute, it has been used for centuries in different religious practices all over the world, but is also frequently present in secular and even quotidian usage.
In Rehearsal, Anna Gimein set out to investigate whether the mere repetition of a gesture such as an embrace between two people who do not frequently engage in that act can bring about a change between them, which would in turn be reflected in the gestures. The video is an extract from the record of the complete, which lasted approximately 40 minutes.

A cycle of documentaries by Andrés Senra and Sarah Minter, complements the exhibition.
Andrés Senra’s film, Kommune, is a human and landscape portrait of the free town of Christiania and its inhabitants; photography, video, watercolor.
Summer in Utopia by Sarah Minter is a story about a hippie, anarchist community founded in 1971, downtown Copenhagen. Currently, it counts more than 900 inhabitants. During all these years they have been fighting to survive the threats of the state.
The documentaries give an overview of the new challenges that this community faces today.

Documentation
• Leaflet of the exhibition