Expanded Bodies

The expanded body projects itself onto any surface that can reflect light. An expanded body stretches, extends and radiates in multiple ways, both physically and conceptually. At its most primordial level it seeks to transcend the idea of the flat, square, single and frontal screen to venture out and explore new forms and strategies that invite us to broaden our gaze.

The watchwords to this year’s expanded programme at l’Alternativa Hall are analogue and live.

We begin with a full line-up curated by Crater-Lab as part of Spectral, a project cofunded by Creative Europe to promote analogue filmmaking with an experimental and DIY spirit. This initiative has been taken up by six laboratories, among them Crater-Lab, an independent creative hub that has been active in Barcelona since 2014.

The programme continues the following evening with On Lines, a live audiovisual collaboration between Chilean filmmaker Carlos Vásquez Méndez and Iraqi experimental musician Dania Shihab which explores the notion of lines as perceptual limits and symbolic thresholds.

Crater-Lab’s contribution opens with the double bill Diffraction, presented by La Lumière Collective from Canada: a 16 mm short film screening paired with a live performance by artists Erin Weisgerber and Liam O’Neill, inspired by filmic research on the progressive retreat of glaciers.

The second live piece, Warm Data, comes from Poland-born, Finland-based artist Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki, who immerses herself in the urban fabric to twist the notion of cold data, the quantitative and detached figures of the city. The session concludes with Visual and Sonic Fantasies for a Possible End of the World, created by local artists Antonio Bértolo, Laura Moreno Bueno and Tasio.

We will conclude the expanded programme with Higo Mental #30 Index. Problematising the Visible, a session shaped as a performative lecture in the form of a videological dialogue reflecting on the themes running through Ricardo Pérez-Hita and Marta Sesé’s project Higo Mental over the past ten years.