In Search of the Best Cyclist in the World by Carolina González Valencia is a fragmented narrative where the filmmaker stitch together her memories of immigrating to the USA as a teenager with her father’s memories as the only one in the family who never left the country. Father and daughter navigate the complexities of remembering and the need to understand consequences of the past in the present. Animation, home movies re-enactments, news archives, and a recent trip tell stories of a departure and the tales in between distance, time and years of absence. The father insists on forgetting, the daughter insist on remembering. How do you negotiate history within the ones who left and the ones who stay? Perhaps the film is a self portrait, a family portrait, a portrait of a story of migration, perhaps all of them. The filmmaker aims to contribute, to complicate those portraits, to contextualize, to reveal the layers from the micro to the macro.
Carolina González Valencia: In Search of The Best Cyclist in The World is paired with Jessica Hankey + Erin Johnson: Salidas y Entradas / Exits and Entrances in Vox Populi’s Black Box Performing Arts Space as part of a program curated by Imani Roach for 4th Wall, an ongoing series dedicated to screening new film and video works by emerging artists.
About the Artist
Carolina González Valencia (Bogotá, Colombia 1985, lives and works in Lewiston, Maine) received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. Her work exists in the intersection where personal, social, and political stories meet. She weaves animation, video, performance, drawing and installation aiming to create new documents that challenge social and historical representations of migration, otherness, diaspora, and labor. Currently, Carolina is an Assistant Professor in the department of Art and Visual Culture at Bates College, in Lewiston Maine. González Valencia works have been screen and exhibit in: The Center for Maine Contemporary Biennial, in Rockland, Maine, The Museum of Contemporary art in Quito, Ecuador; also, she has been part of screening series and film festivals such as: GAZE, in San Francisco, California, International short films showcase, in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, International short films and videos in the Full Frame Theater, Durham, North Carolina. Broward College, Davie Florida, Contra el Silencio todas las voces Film Festival, Mexico City. Cinemateca Distrital, Bogotá D.C, Colombia. Her films have also been screened in public access TV such as CanTV Chicago, and Videonautas, Telepacifico, Colombia.
More Info: carolinagonzalezvalencia.com