Venice Biennale 2015
Collateral Event: Catalonia
Artist: Albert Serra
Curator: Chus Martinez
If Raymond Williams were to decide on another entry for his celebrated text of Keywords today he surely would have included SINGULARITY.
The term refers to the moment when artificial intelligences will surpass human capacity and human control. In mathematics, singularity describes a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined or not “well-behaved”, for example infinite or not differentiable. Filmmaker Albert Serra will take this notion as a point of departure to produce a new film. Interested in how images act in a given diversity of contexts, the project presents the audience with a filmic space investigating the range of “applications“the notion of singularity has. It designates a turning point in the way we relate to information, to “matter“, to images produced by machines, to representation, to the interplay between culture and nature. It actually names a new era where these dualisms no longer exist. A machine-made cosmology, a capital of knowledge capable of altering our dreams, the image we have and will have about the world.
Albert Serra (Banyoles, 1975) is a film director and producer. His first film, Crespià, the film not the village (2003) was never commercially distributed. Later, he made Honor de cavalleria and El cant dels ocells (Gaudí Award for the best film of 2009). In 2009 he was selected to be the icon of new avant-garde cinema by the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs del Festival de Cannes. In the year 2012 he was one of the artists chosen to participate in dOCUMENTA in Kassel where he presented his movie, Els tres porquets. Last year he won the award for best movie at the Locarno Festival with his production, Història de la meva mort (2013). Most recently he was invited by two prestigious centers, Pompidou, in Paris, (2013) and Bozar, in Brussels (2014), to present a project carte blanche.
Chus Martínez (La Coruña, 1972) is currently the director of the Art Institut at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basilea, Switzerland. Her professional trajectory has led her to be the artistic director of the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao (2002-2005), the director of the Frankfurter Kuntstverein Museum (2005-2008), and the chief curator of the MACBA (2008-2011). Most recently she worked as chief curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York City and was part of the curating team of dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. In 2005 Martínez was the curator of the National Pavilion of Cyprus for the 51st edition of the Biennale di Venezia with a project by Panayiotis Michael and Konstantia Sofokleou. She also formed part of the advisory committee for the Carnegie International Exposition 2008, and she participated as the invited curator for the 29th Biennial of São Paulo in 2010.
Image: © Albert Serra Juanola