Carlos Amorales
La aldea maldita
HD video, black and white, sound
13:00 min
2017
Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
The film La aldea maldita [The Cursed Village] narrates the story of a family of migrants who are lynched as they reach a strange town. In this fantastical village, a puppeteer challenges our pre-existing vision of the world as he manipulates the characters in a kind of shadow play that seems to be activated by musicians and actors. The visual vocabulary that Carlos Amorales (Mexico City, 1970) uses in many of his installations, animations, drawings, sculptures and paintings, comes from his "Liquid Archive", a digital collection of cut out images that the artist extracts from his observation of nature and diverse urban scenes. Among the main symbols that repeat themselves throughout the archive are spider webs, birds, skulls, leafy branches, and pregnant women.
Jesse Lerner
The American Egypt
Digital video (excerpt)
25:39 min
2001
Courtesy the artist
Experimental filmmaker Jesse Lerner focuses on the liberal history of the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico), which, in addition to having had separatist aspirations, held one of the first socialist governments in the world for a brief period in the early twentieth century. By telling this story using archival images and texts of various origins, Lerner establishes implicit connections between the economic development of the region (originally based on Peonage, a system similar to slavery that allowed for the massive exploitation and export of the fiber of the henequen plant to the United States), and other events in the political history of Latin America that were directly related to the economic interests of North America in the rest of the continent.
Click here to read Lerner’s text “Bodies Without Souls, Souls Without Bodies” commissioned for this digital publication.