Film & Video (Film & Video)

biarritzzz is interested in how the development of the internet, and experimentation in the virtual world happens simultaneously with the experimentation in the material world of the human species; and how these developments reflect the precariousness of life within neoliberalism. The title of their video work Mandacura is a corruptela (a linguistic distortion on writing or pronunciation) of the Portuguese sentence Mão da Cura (Healing Hand), distorting Portuguese into what sounds as Brazilian Afro-Indigenous. Inspired by and using the music and poetry of Alberto Marques, and drawing sources from archival images, webcam videos, screenshots, gifs and memes, the video asks: What provokes our feelings toward society, history, culture, and the future?

Installation (Installation)

Addressing the 1966 XVII World Chess Olympics, Pataki 1921 by Ulrik López continues the artist’s interest in chess as a subject and as a symbol for various world affairs and political confrontations. Pataki 1921 is an installation that derives from and expands on Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso’s ballet piece titled La partida viviente (The Living Match) which opened the Olympic. The choreography recreates the 1921 World Championship chess match where the Cuban player José Raúl Capablanca won the world title against the German master Emmanuel Lasker, becoming the first Latin-American, but more precisely Caribbean, player to win this title.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the film La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age) Javier Castro asks several children to describe what they want to be when they grow up and what their best career option is in Cuba. Their responses are telling: some hopeful or playful in nature as one would expect, and others crudely revealing the harsh reality that the children perceive. The work takes its title from a children’s magazine produced by José Martí in 1889, during the years leading to the Cuban War of Independence from Spain in which Marti lost his life.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Negro sobre Negro (Black on Black) all we see is a completely black screen on a monitor that is recessed into a wall, also painted black. Gradually, the face of a man becomes visible as he steps out of the darkness and closer to the camera. As suggested by Castro, the color of this man’s skin allows him to pass unnoticed perhaps literally, but also metaphorically as he alludes with certain humor to the iconic work Black Square by Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, often referred to as the “zero point of painting” in Western art-historical discourses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Blanco sobre Blanco (White on White) , we see a white man appearing in a white screen embedded into a white wall— alluding to Malevich’s White on White series. Analogously, in Castro’s related work Negro sobre Negro (Black on Black) all we see is a completely black screen on a monitor that is recessed into a wall, also painted black. Gradually, the face of a man becomes visible as he steps out of the darkness and closer to the camera.