A fall, a fracture, a possibility is an international collective section in which we will show works that go beyond conventional audiovisual formats, defining the axis of the curatorial line of INTERSECTION 2022.

The section will also include the work of Pauline Julier, Allora&Calzadilla, Ana Moure + César Fuentes, Mon Cano + Íñigo Barrón, Enrique Ramírez and Edgar Díaz.

We enter a plane whose destination is modernization or globalization and, once aboard, the pilot announces: “We can no longer land in that place because it is gone”. So we turn around the plane. We say: “if modernization does not exist anymore, let’s go back to the land we know, to our ancestors’ domains”. And, of course, that old land does not exist anymore either.

– Bruno Latour in Naturales Historiae

“Where to land?”, wonders Bruno Latour in Naturales Historiae, a film by Pauline Julier, to whom INTERSECCIÓN dedicates a focus within the section A fall, a fracture, a possibility.

In a moment in time where modernization isn’t an option anymore and nor is going back to the way things were centuries ago, this is perhaps one of the most pertinent questions to think about. This section explores a spectrum of critical, propositional and speculative views on the ecological crisis we are facing and its possible ways out.

Globally, the prevailing narrative until now has been one of progress and material unlimited growth: that of a straight line that sweeps away everything it finds in its way. Nonetheless, in this state of permanent crisis we find ourselves in, it seems like all the myths are starting to fall and the stories we were told are not adding up anymore.

In this context, the future went from being something to hope for to being something to dread and prevent. We know that the narratives that used to guide us are exhausted but we still do not know how to write another one to be our compass through the forthcoming decades. While some voices insist on the idea of the future being canceled, some others assure that the stories we tell ourselves about tomorrow make up the great contemporary contested territory.

In the midst of planetary crisis and chaos, the selection of films in this program ask: how do we live with uncertainty? What do we decide to keep and what do we dismiss? What lands, languages, peoples, plants will be left behind? How do we mourn what has been lost while keeping grief from paralyzing us? What new perspectives arise in this fall –with a yet unknown destination–that we are experiencing? Can a new sense of freedom be gained from all of this?

A fall, a fracture, a possibility approaches, from a poetic lens, the ecological crisis we are facing as a species. Sometimes hopeful, sometimes heartbroken, the films included in this section deal with the sense of loss ––of biodiversity, of safe places, of information, of memories, etc. – that we, as a species, are experiencing and causing.

Pauline Julier’s work vertebrates the section, for her films embrace all of the questions the other included artists are involved with, including language, memory, geography, grief, geopolitics, technology and nostalgia among others; all of them topics of interest for the other artists in the section:

In L’homme sans image, Enrique Ramírez looks to the horizon, he looks up and down and wonders, from the liquid instability of the present, if the wave will crash and what will happen afterwards.

On the other hand, in The great silence, by Allora&Calzadilla, it’s a parrot who addresses us and wonders what has brought us to this place and what will happen to us once its species has disappeared.
Ana Moure and César Fuentes explore the more-than-human relationships people and sparrows have built over the centuries and the transformations they have undergone in An uneasy alliance.

In Never Ending and Polvo de Otro Planeta Mon Cano and Íñigo Barrón reflect on the material implications of the digital and speculate about a future where artificial intelligence keeps moving on, in spite of everything, ¿and without us?, towards an unknown place.

The Yearning of Welfare (La añoranza del bienestar), by Edgar Díaz, gets deep into the causes and consequences of “the end of history” paradigm defended by Francis Fukuyama and the resulting nostalgic fold that the precarious and unknown future we face forces us into.

A fall, a fracture, a possibility
Ana Escariz