In Fourth Wall, across October and November, Vox presents Fantasías animadas (Merry Melodies), screenings selected by Eduardo Thomas, in association with Strange Currencies: Art & Action in Mexico City, 1990-2000, on view at The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design. Major support for Strange Currencies has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Fantasías animadas (Merry Melodies)
Many artists explored the possibilities of working with video formats in Mexico long before the 1990s. However, this decade witnessed a boom of audiovisual products, notably during the second half of the period. The reasons for this creative explosion are tightly related to the advent of the Mini-DV format. Relatively affordable, this newfound media allowed not only for the creation of lower budget projects, but also triggered a more intimate and direct approach to shooting video. The hand-sized cameras favored mobility and a strong DIY flair, which in turn nurtured artists’ constant negotiation of their visual literacy. During this time, global and local cinema traditions informed and shaped strange hybrid productions, resulting in mutated audiovisual renderings of local urban mythologies mashed up with a society’s concerns at the turn of a century.
The works included in Fantasías animadas (Merry Melodies) highlight the relationship between music and image, and could easily be categorized as an artist’s take on the music video clip format. From opera to street-like Carnival, from surf attack to funky dub sessions and spoken word jams, the eclectic vibe of the 1990s permeates them all.
October 2 – November 1
Cosi fan tutte | Jesusa Rodríguez | 1997 | 92 mins.
November 6 – November 29
Electroperrofunkymix | Santiago Huerta & Rafael Tonatiuh | 1991 | 2:35 mins.
Help! | Ximena Cuevas | 1999 | 1:10 mins.
Mambo Queen | Grace Quintanilla | 1995 | 3 mins.
La manada | Bruno Varela | 1998 | 2:55 mins.
El dedal de rosas | Mariana Botey | 1998 | 13 mins.
Mambo número 8 | Mariana Rodríguez | 1997 | 4 mins.
¡Ah pinche zombie cachetón! | Renato Ornelas | 1998 | 3 mins.
Yepa Yepa Yepa | Miguel Calderón | 2001 | 4:10 mins.
Eduardo Thomas (born Mexico, 1976)
Eduardo Thomas’s practice as a visual artist and film curator focuses on the construction of reality through the moving image, foregrounding the relationship between the mechanisms of translation and narrative structures as a means of enunciation. Be it through a phenomenological approach towards the act of projection; the questioning of documentary strategies on screen; or the role of the moving image as a mediator of our social contexts, his curatorial projects provoke critical insights into the way cinema shapes our experience of the world.
Thomas has curated retrospective series of filmmakers, including Gustav Deutsch, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Arthur Omar, presenting their work for the first time in Mexico.
In 2013 he was awarded a research grant by The Japan Foundation to investigate the relationship of the Shinto-Buddhist concept of ‘ma’ and experimental film practices in Japan. More recently, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Thomas initiated the production/distribution collective .PIC, which fosters the creation of audio-visual works that inhabit the fringes of cinema and contemporary art.
He holds an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (NL) in collaboration with Plymouth University (UK).