Aliens

By Luis López Carrasco. In conversation with Alejandra Rosenberg. Streaming April 3–9, 2023. Part of Looking Up, curated by Jorge Jácome for the Artist ...

In the case of Aliens, it seemed interesting to me that at the end of a more official exhibition on La Movida, the visitor would find two paintings by Tesa and my short film, as if a kind of bomb had been dropped on the waterline of the discourse—or a submerged bomb had risen to the surface. [[1]](applewebdata://AC82FF5B-173C-46AA-A85F-DC159CA4746C#_ednref1) A countercultural movement that took place mainly in Madrid during the Spanish transition to democracy, following the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. Actually, it was related to something that still worries me today, the feeling that the mainstream narrative of Spanish democracy was very homogeneous and had left out a lot of experiences of various collectives and territories. The work I am now doing on the television program Vivir cada día (1978-1988) has to do with my strong sense that there have been no images of the emotions, sensibilities, and experiences of the social majority from the 1980s onward in Spain. LLC: Using the amateur and the domestic, in terms of a microhistory of everyday life, to talk about life as opposed to grand historical narratives is something that has always interested me. In the end, maintaining both an oral dimension and a written dimension in the film was one of the ways of showing the different facets of this personality, which, like all personalities, is multiple. I put it together to point to some of the hypotheses I had about it. For the paintings, the reference was Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s film A Visit to the Louvre (2004), but for the other material—I spent a day trying to figure out how to fit those in. LLC: Originally, the piece was going to work more with the texture of the video. It seems to me that each of your projects experiments with a different recording format that suits that particular project: Here it’s video, but in The Future it’s 16 mm, if I’m not mistaken. In the 1980s, everyone in Spain knew about her, and it was appalling that she disappeared from the public eye. [[1]](applewebdata://AC82FF5B-173C-46AA-A85F-DC159CA4746C#_edn1) I was thinking about what to do because I had a lot of archival material and footage that I hadn’t used in the final cut of my film The Future.