Valentina Alvarado Matos and Elena Duque have some biographical facts in common: they both come from Venezuela and currently live in Spain, and this, in very different ways for each one of them, has left a very deep impression in their lives and in their way to understand the world and their artistic practices. They both share a deep love for plastic arts that began with their fathers: painting and collage have always been there. They both use collage as a way to express this somehow collaged identity and creative processes, composed by heterogeneous materials and experiences difficult to bring together in any other way. In this program – and that makes us particularly happy – their works come together: the sea, their hands, painting, collage and a permanent longing for the tropics are some of the elements that bring together all the stops in this tour across their films and performances.

Valentina Alvarado Matos will begin with estoy raspando la hoja y la voz, “a read gesture that combines image, voice, and sound, and that reflects on a series of readings about the landscape and its representation. It is an attempt at a fragmented narrative that reflects how the memory of the landscape is displaced. “(V.A.M.) This will be followed by alternating works by the two artists on Super 8 and 16mm, creating a dialogue of practices and ideas: Elena Duque's Mar de coral combines, both intuitively and with a feeling for color and structure, her own material collected over the years with found footage.

“More than a film, Mar de coral is a kind of occupational therapy in a troubled moment: to screen one's own and other people's films, to understand how to relate to their images and to connect with how other people's films can speak of one's own life, and then to slaughter them mercilessly, as befits the most primal collagist spirit. The table ends up full of little film strips, each with a descriptive title, and the work of constructing a story that no one will probably be able to spin, except the one who puts it together, gets underway. It is to be hoped that what is in the frame will touch similar springs in other souls. Then comes the rhythmic work of splicing those pieces together in order to classify them sometimes by blocks of color, with the pleasure of using that tiny splicer, a meditative and meticulous work. (…) An imperfect and humble film, almost private. A scrapbook whose title also comes from that same chance, which always has the grace to end up making sense: a coral is an organism formed by hundreds or thousands of small animals.” (E.D.)

El mar peinó a la orilla by Valentina Alvarado Matos uses various interventions – brushstrokes, objects in front of the lens, her own hands – to work and play with images of the Catalonian sea: “Drawing a brushstroke to join the sea and the sky, erase the horizon, or raise a new dawn. El mar peinó a la orilla tries to think of new geographies and play, from the plastic, by altering the filmed landscape.” (V.A.M.) „The sea is what separates her from her homeland in Venezuela, so one can imagine what it is like to look at the ocean thinking of what is going on on the other side of it.” (Doc’s Kingdom)

Using different animation techniques, the autobiographical film Colección privada works humorously and sensitively with objects and documents the filmmaker accumulated over the course of a lifetime:

“Collage is a kind of disease that pushes the sufferer to accumulate all kinds of objects of different origins. Own objects but also others, found in flea markets, liquidations, junk shops, in the same street. More than once I have found next to a garbage can the clothes of a stranger, her photos, her suitcases, a string of buttons or a purse. The belongings that remain behind a life, collections that are difficult to unravel but that spark the imagination and appeal to ineffable emotions. Colección privada is a film that comes precisely from there: from wanting to elaborate my own life story from the objects I have been accumulating (before they are potentially deposited on a sidewalk when I am no longer there), which can be personal documents, gifts from friends or lovers, passport photos, dresses, souvenirs of places visited, notes and drawings in my own handwriting and even parts or prostheses of my own body. (…) In this way I build my own personal museum, a biographic philately album that I decide to film in super 8, thus generating one more object that becomes part of my collection. An object that, like many of those I collect, is imperfect and irregular, and is as tiny as my own presence in the universe as a whole.Colección privada is, then, an anti-epic film, whose background is a sensitive nerve in the open: the impossibility of returning home or finding a new one that is not built on shifting sands, and the need to build one with the means at one's disposal. In this case, a film with brief animated explosions, refilming, minimal still lifes, and almost documentary moments. A film to which chapters could be added year by year: my private collection already has new and valuable acquisitions.”(E.D.)

In Trópico desvaído, the landscapes of Spain and Venzuela merge thanks to a dreamlike montage of image and sound. “A house burns down. My father opens a drawing that sounds like an explosion. I build new landscapes with my hands from postcards of Venezuela found in Barcelona. Filmed between Venezuela and Spain, trópico desváido traces a round trip from short landscape observations and notebook-like exercises linked to the territory.” (V.A.M.) Ojitos mentirosos is a film that uses architecture and the materiality of Super 8 to reflect on the idea of trompe-l'oeil and how cinema itself is a machine that works through the deception of the eyes: “Linking these ideas with the filming in super 8 of some trompe-l’oeil paintings in different parts of Madrid, together with natural shots of motifs similar to those portrayed in these trompe l’oeil paintings, animations and reflections in mirrors, the idea was to relate cinema and painting through these plastic qualities and associative games.” (E.D.) Propiedades de una esfera paralela, a double projection that oscillates elegantly between different states and reflects on the connection and opposition of images: “Two screens show processes of trial, error, and performativity in front of the camera in an attempt to green a winter landscape. Filmed during a residency in the middle of a Canadian winter, Properties of a Parallel Sphere insists on testing by filming plastic devices and juxtaposing an indoors landscape with another outdoors landscape.” (V.A.M.) To conclude the program, Elena Duque invites you to her Curso de pintura rápida para principantes, consisting of three works (Naturaleza muerta, Pintura-acción and Retrato sentado) which, not without humor, move on the border between cinema, performance and painting.


In the presence of Valentina Alvarado Matos and Elena Duque. Many thanks to the filmmakers for curating and providing the prints of this program.

With the very friendly support of Instituto Cervantes Frankfurt (Ferran Ferrando, Eva Soria Barres)