Galician orbit
One of the keys that from the beginning has sought to serve as a differentiating element of Intersección has been to opt for the fusion of the arts, understanding the corresponding specificity of each project but trying to break the logic that imposes a model of labels as a disintegrating element. In this sense, the aim is for the exhibition channels to be increasingly broadened, forming a plural platform in which the different ramifications of the audiovisual medium have a place. If the Galician section of the festival has been able to bring together year after year a roster of creators as interesting as they are disparate, where the common ground is marked by difference and allows for the richness of our artistic ecosystem, on this occasion the efforts to suggest new dialogues are even more notable. For the first time, the Galicia section is represented in two formats: exhibition and single-channel. We have always pursued this interrelation between formats in all the proposals that form part of the Intersection poster, although it is also necessary to play between the limits in order to highlight the results of all this collective effort. The Galician section is growing to allow us to broaden the registers we work with and provide greater consistency in our coverage of artists in orbit.

On many occasions art is used as a tool for social critique, reconfiguring or underlining certain behaviours that can serve as allegories of the world’s shortcomings. Significant here is the strategy of Laura Tabarés, who uses 3D software to give life to a creepypasta story around the figure of the Softboy (a sensitive, intellectual boy), an archetypal character with which to call attention to so-called soft masculinity and its role in the adulteration of macho violence. Experiences, both social and personal, can serve as a means of denunciation through plastic activism. As in the work of Cabanes Fontao, crossed by a theoretical corpus centred on the investigation of the plastic pollution of the planet, in a work that involves the collection of waste converted into nests of light to, on this occasion, make them dialogue with a video where cultures and musicalities merge. Another of the concerns reviewed from the point of view of the arts is the interest, from an almost philosophical point of view, in the new virtual realities. With Digitos, Alba Mantilla immerses us in a sort of dystopia that leads us to rethink the limits of perception by contributing an interesting reflection on the wandering of bodies in a space where the concept of death changes in meaning and appearance. The screens era also populates Belén Montero’s universe in a site-specific installation that modifies the architectural reality of the space by flooding it with forms that our imaginary easily recognises as the hashtag# of social networks. Once again, the peculiar encounter between the physical and the digital emerges.

Other artists analyse the very conception of the audiovisual medium to the point of radicalising its limits. While Alberte Pagán maintains his militant character and presents us with “the shortest possible film”, made up of a single frame, Alberto Ardid disarms the concept of the single-channel by playing with a self-referential loop that ends up by uncontrolling the magnetic fields of the medium. Likewise, Juan López proposes a clash of realities through an installation in which he investigates the relationship between sound and event, between the formulas for confronting the different reading codes. There are multiple possibilities when it comes to exploring the image, as many as there are derived narratives. One of them is proposed by Roi Fernández in Contra la imagen, fuego escita, an experience of plastic and conceptual exploration from which to approach human thoughts and reactions through archive material extracted from three unconnected news items that, reconfigured, locate new ways of seeing.

On the other hand, there are those who use the medium to face us in front of the screen and recreate themselves in slow times, like Eva Díez and her landscapes populated with reflections and light, with an energy where the house, covered with mirrors and stripped of its original context, reflects and is in turn reflected in order to merge with nature and suggest other ways of inhabiting the world. Iria Vázquez’s is also a lyrical proposal. Here, light and movement point to the sensitivity of the perceptive act, to the attraction for the hidden and the potentiality of the everyday. Meanwhile, Alba Villar returns us to a cruder reality, a story in which the autobiographical, the pandemic, the sea and the land are interwoven to bring us closer to the possibility of an imminent catastrophe, but also to the beauty of the living. Another landscape, radically different, can be found in the installation by Pablo Agma and Raquel Álvarez, full of topographies and transits, of bodies that leave their traces in the territory, revealing the sensuality of our drives and the marks of our actions. The body is also one of the main creative supports in the work of Monica Mura, who on this occasion plays with perceptual dislocation through the exercise of automatic writing. Without the possibility of deciphering what is written, its translation becomes sonorous, trapped between the digital and the analogue medium to perpetuate itself in the manner of a moebius band.

These are some of the formulations distilled in the Galicia section, which continues to offer a multidirectional approach capable of addressing the interests and visual guidelines of our contemporary horizon. There are many new names, as well as returning artists, and an intergenerational approach open to the construction of new work networks, to the crossing of gazes and the symbiosis between the audiovisual creation that is coming and that which has already been perpetuated. All of this is the result of the magic of the arts in its impulse to question the present and build futures.