Roundtable
New Perspectives on Receiving Images

Parallel Activities
Exposición: Espejos en la niebla (Un ensayo audiovisual) (Exhibition: Mirrors in the Mist (An Audiovisual Essay))
Basilio Martín Patino
Spain, 2008
DVD | 67min. | Mixed
Production: Carmen Gullón

Photography: Santiago Ochoa, Fernando Pascual, Carlos Mezquita, Antonio Moro
Editor: Martin Eller, Pedro Alvera
Screenplay: Basilio Martín Patino
Music: Johan Solco Bakker, Federico Tensi, Cristóbal Rodríguez Moure, Scott Stallings, Gabriel Calvo, Johann Strauss
 
Sinopsis
Espejos en la niebla, the latest audiovisual piece by Basilio Martín Patino's production company La Linterna Mágica, weaves its way through the twentieth century in Salamanca, striking a dialectic contrast between El Cuartón, home to the Luna Terreros, a family of landowners, and the individual plots of land in Centenares, a tiny village built out of nothing by the numerous tenant farmers forced to leave El Cuartón overnight with all their family, livestock and belongings, as Macu Vicente recalls in his book Centenares.
This traumatic experience is portrayed through a series of different simultaneous projections within a set of independent glass cells, each with its own subject matter, set up as part of a whole labyrinth of options where visitor-collaborators can accept, reject, complement, prefer, alter, combine or replace images in accordance with their own criteria. The result is a critical reading of the past based on a particular case through an intrahistorical perspective which aims to throw some light on the socioeconomic and cultural tensions that afflicted Spain in the first third of the twentieth century. As Basilio Martín Patino says in one of the exhibition texts, "in that labyrinth of social interests you could sense the great conflict to come: the inferno of a brutal crusade and almost half a century of fratricidal conflict."