24. Alex Reynolds
Como si fuera viento (As if it were wind)
Syndicate at Drop City
Antwerp BE
Friday 28 June, 19:00
Images / Text
Drop City
Osystraat 45
2060 Antwerp BE
drop-city.net
Doors and barbecue 19:00
Screening 21:30
Followed by questions by artist Rubén Grilo
An open air screening of Alex Reynolds' Como si fuera viento (As if it Were Wind), with Elena Barreras, Eli Lloveras, Anna Manubens, Violeta Mayoral, Clara Piazuelo, and Ana Rodriguez Granell.
Every film could be said to be two films at once: on the one hand, there is the story being told, and on the other, a document of the people and place that generates that story. As a group of friends decides to turn their holiday on the Galician coast into a shoot for a zombie film, Como si Fuera Viento emerges as a celebration of friendship that is at once tender and horrific.
Alex Reynolds (b 1978, Bilbao) is an artist and filmmaker living in Brussels and Berlin, whose consistent obsession is in testing cinematic structures. Honing into the intersection of portraiture and fiction, her films often walk the line between tenderness and violence to explore the expansive and invasive potential of point of view, empathy, and rhythm.
Reynolds previously collaborated with Syndicate for projects in Brussels, Athens, Cologne, and Düsseldorf. Rubén Grilo previously collaborated with Drop City in Newcastle, Antwerp, and Düsseldorf.
Other past exhibitions include Hollybush Gardens (London UK), Centro Botín (Santander ES), CAC Vilnius (LT), Estrany-de la Mota (Barcelona ES), Galeria Marta Cervera (Madrid ES), Komplot (Brussels BE), and Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm SE). She received a 2016 Fundacion Botín international visual arts prize and a 2014 fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart DE). Reynolds is a lecturer at Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten (KASK) in Ghent.
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Questions from Rubén Grilo voiced by the audience, answers from Alex Reynolds
RUBÉN
Greetings and thanks to my dear friends for their kind invitation.
I got to know about this movie when it wasn't a movie yet. I remember that Alex wrote to tell me she would go on holidays with friends to Galicia, where I am from. But back then, I had no idea that she was going to make a movie, and we pretty much only spoke about beaches and food. In fact, I encountered the movie much later in an exhibition in Madrid, and I was very surprised to see how those very holidays have turned into fiction. The place was real, the friends where real, but all the rest was not.
One of the reasons why I admire Alex so much is how she rules this media. I, myself, wouldn't even know where to start. That's why when she proposed me to take part in this presentation the first thing I said was 'maybe I am not the best person to talk about your movie, because actually I know nothing about cinema.' 'But you know about Galicians,' she replied. And she was right.
We are used to speak about fiction as a genre contained in literature, theatre or cinema, but I believe Alex has always pointed at something broader. Lately I was reading philosopher Thomas Metzinger talk about consciousness as a way to actually form a difference between what is real and what is not. He means, while we are aware of the complex processes involved in experiencing reality as real, we still experience it just as if we were in direct contact with things. We can turn our attention to the processes themselves without actually interrupting the feeling of being who we truly feel to be. Think of it as some sort of 'calibration of truth' which lets us imagine other people, other worlds, other realities. This is why we can know we are watching a movie and still be thrilled by it. This is why Alex' friends can also be zombies, and a peaceful holiday resort can at the same time be the set of a horror story.
Thus being a zombie, like being Galician, quickly becomes political because it's a role to fit in. Something we want to keep as the sort of representation that represents itself instead of a representation of reality. In that sense I love the idea to see clichés as something we can use to bring with us on holidays and fuck around with. As a tool to give us insight about all those other representations that would otherwise be unnoticed but model our lives for real. What I really like about the movie is that it doesn't present fiction as something opposed to reality but as a place that we can collectively enter to learn about how others want us to be and how we can be instead. So to play along, and as I can't be present there tonight, I have proposed a few questions for those in the audience who want to help me read them out loud to Alex like a Galician would. Or not.
answers transcript to come