The Book To Come
Marcel Broodthaers, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’, 1969. Photo: Filiep Tacq.
Thursday 14 July 2016
‘Now that Mallarmé is dead, let's roll the dice on the idea of cinema’, proposed by Esperanza Collado
4pm / Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao / Session eleven, ‘The Book to Come’ – Reading Group.
This session considered possible relationships between film, books and text. It vertebrated around Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolirá le hazard, as foundational in the contemporary idea of space, and which was transformed by Marcel Broodthaers into a “specific object”. We explored some of the keys of the Belgian artist’ filmic model, and how they set up dialogues with the work of other artists, including his own.
The session began with a presentation of Things Said Once / Cosas dichas una vez, an artistic statement and an eulogy to film, which proposes text and its reading as a screening and performance. Following this, we looked at a constellation of works that set up relationships to some of the central concerns of Broodthaers’ filmic model, where Mallarmean time and the issue of sequentiality in Baudelaire are called upon to conjugate the mobile with the static, spatiality with punctuation signs, the hand with the eye, the page with the still image. The third part of the session consisted of a series of exercises in writing directly onto 16mm film and then project the material.
Esperanza Collado (Valencia, 1976) works with possible relationships between painting and sculpture, performance and film. Her book Paracinema: la desmaterialización del cine en las prácticas artísticas provides a critical reflection on “adisciplinary” film practice, and questions the philosophical vocation of the film medium. Performances in the past three years include works at the Lajevardi Foundation (Teheran), Images Festival (Toronto), Twelfth Havana Biennial (Cuba), Art Cinema OFF-off (Ghent), Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, MAC Val (Paris), Laboral (Gijón), CA2M, MUSAC, CCCB, Temple Bar Gallery (Dublin), Azala (Lasierra, Araba), Art Centre Ongoing (Tokyo). While she was working on her PhD thesis, Collado curated experimental film programmes and exhibitions and related activities in different spaces in Dublin. She has given talks and published texts in magazines and catalogues. She is currently working on LEVE, a field recording project, with Rafa Martínez del Pozo (AA Tigre) and teaches at the Fine Art faculty in Cuenca.