Esperanza Collado & Las de Cuenca

Kicked with the Front Foot on the Dark Side of the Deck is an setting for experimentation and performative improvisation with projected light, chromatic games, 16mm film, live sound and direct interventions by skaters and performers who create mutant installations.

Starting from the spatial, plastic and performative relations and potentialities of the filmic apparatus - understood as a 'projective and mnenonic' formation - we try to challenge the traditional formats of exhibition of the image-movement to situate ourselves between the sensorial environment, action art and the unstable installation. The primacy of the image and the traditional unidirectionality of projection are compromised in order to place notions of presence, immediacy, body, performativity and liveness.

"This piece starts from a personal interest in skateboarding, which began last year when I was in residence in Taipei (Taiwan). In the studio where I was staying there was a long distance from the workspace to my room. Then another artist invited me to use his skateboard to move from one place to another. From there, and from starting a bit of skateboarding and watching a lot of videos, I figured it might be interesting to introduce skateboarding into expanded cinema, in a spatial situation of cinematic projection.

"Re-inventing the film medium in the age of the end of the analogical means «reconceptualizing it as a set of conventions derived from the material conditions of its technical support», to move on to posit it as a form of expression that can be both projective and mnemonic."

Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition.

This project began to take gestation with its initial presentation at #ojorimaconmáquina (Valentina Alvarado Matos and Carlos Vásquez Méndez) at La Escocesa, Barcelona, December 2020, and continued to develop at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca in January and February 2021. In June it was presented at the S8 Mostra de Cinema Periférico.

Organises and produces
Centre d'Arts Santa Mònica