video art

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with video artist, activist and researcher Marina Gržinić, which we were unable to include the first time around. Marina reflects on her trajectory, together with Aina Šmid, in the field of video art and new media, from the eighties to the present day, from a feminist and socialist perspective.

Eugènia Balcells (Barcelona, 1943) began her artistic career in the mid-seventies within the conceptual art scene. A pioneer of experimental film, video art, and video installation, she also works with visual scores, artist’s books, objects, performance art, photocopies, sounds, and photographs. Balcells considers herself an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the possibilities of physics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, sociology, music, and poetry. She brings these disciplines into the field of art, as an agora from which to reimagine and reinvent the world. In FONS AUDIO #54 we join Eugènia Balcells in looking back over a life dedicated to art, pausing to examine some of her works in the MACBA collection.

In the second episode of this series we pick up where we left off in our conversation with Lluïsa Roca, Luisa Ortínez, Xefo Guasch and Carles Ameller. With them, we explore Vídeo-Nou’s working methodologies, which were developed on the go, in the field, by doing things: because video was a new medium at the time, and because, together, they were inventing a system of transversal collaboration through which to capture the views and demands of a society eager to express itself after forty years of dictatorship, censorship and repression. Vídeo-Nou saw video as a mechanism for social engagement and intervention, making space for listening, conversation and debate as creative tools. Through video, the group became actively involved in neighbourhoods, community centres and associations, trade unions, and cultural spaces, opening up platforms for dialogue.

Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco explores issues such as cultural, racial, and gender identity; the construction of alterity; the colonial legacy; and the mechanisms of control, censorship and repression that systems of power impose on people’s bodies and lives. In FONS ÀUDIO #63, Fusco discusses two of her works in the MACBA Collection: Els segadors (2001) and Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021), where she reflects respectively on Catalan identity and mourning rituals in times of crisis, connecting the local with the universal.