Satélite espello
Adrián Porcel, 2024.
Video installation, performance, and artist’s book. 2 16 mm films, photographic paper, developing liquids, and roller cutter. Color photographs, variable dimensions.
Views of the installation and performance.
One of the images resulting from the performance.
Artist’s book.
Excerpt from the performance.
The performance proposes the creation of a series of documents that emerge as a result of an experimental staging. One of the mediums is constructed from two darkroom cells and the partition between them—which function as pages and spine—onto which two 16mm films are projected. The first contains NASA archive footage showing the Moon and other celestial bodies, and the second is a fogged reel, intervened with text. The other element arises from the development of photosensitive material exposed in front of the projections. The performers' bodies act as visual translators, filtering and mediating the projected content. Given the random nature of the footage used, control over its content is limited; its value lies precisely in the surprise and fascination of the fortuitous discovery.
The proposal unfolds with a vertiginous rhythm, reminiscent of assembly line production logics. The multiple layers of visual perception generated make a complete reading of what is happening in real time impossible. What remains are the impressions on the photosensitive paper: developed traces of a new content. This paper acts as a medium, evoking—rather than replicating—the qualities of the footage through distortion. The aim is to capture something unknown, without guaranteeing its final form, giving rise to a satellite body: impostor, mutant, vaguely resembling the original. Satélite espello focuses on what escapes the eye—the subliminal, the residual. The production process thus becomes a rite, an act that manifests itself in what now resembles a kind of mothership; a strange, almost spectral space, where the publication is not deliberately designed, but rather discovered as it unfolds.
Participants: María Herreros and Romeo de Gonzalo
With the collaboration and video by: Rosa García