Albert Serra: The Three Little Pigs / SEQUENCE #1

Continuing with the programme dedicated to (para)cinematic, Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona presents a solo show by Albert Serra and a programme of laboratories, conferences and performances that proposes a working framework for delving into the performative link between bodies and images.

Albert Serra​: The Three Little Pigs
Invited by dOCUMENTA (13), in 2012 Albert Serra created The Three Little Pigs, a 101-hour film with Goethe, Hitler and Fassbinder as protagonists. Presented as a continuous flow of discourse, non-professional actors recite the words attributed to these characters from three books: Conversations with Goethe by J.P. Eckermann, The Private Conversations of Hitler and a collection of interviews with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through their dissertations, the personalities and ideas of three figures who marked three key moments in German history and the construction of Europe are portrayed.

The film was shot, edited and projected in Kassel over the 100 days the event lasted. With this cinematic experiment, Serra explores the performativity of the medium but also the fidelity to autobiographical texts and the symbolic construction of history. He revives the path where tradition illuminates the present, as Hannah Arendt would say. This explains these one-hundred-and-one hours of film, a length that obliges us to become aware of what is, or should be, the untiring struggle of our relationship with the past.

This is the premiere in Spain of The Three Little Pigs, which for the first time is removed from the German context thanks to the initiative of Fabra and Coats, who commissioned and guided the colossal task of translating and subtitling the film, a process that has taken nine months. Presented in its multi-screen installation format, at the Contemporary Art Centre the formal fragmentation and conceptual complexity of the project take the form of a triangular display.

SEQUENCE #1
With Cris Celada, Ona Bros, Andrea Soto Calderón, Andrea González, Javi Álvarez, Lorea Alfaro, Olga Mesa, Alejandra Pombo Su, Carme Torrent and Emilio Tomé.

Curated by Fernando Gandasegui and Marc Vives, SEQUENCE #1 is made up of proposals whose link with the practice of image is approached in different ways, although in all of them we can sense translucent and porous invitations that suggest, open, suspend and, above all, imagine other performative planes for the fascinated occurrence of the images.

In the face of positions aligned with the scopic regime aimed at the production and consumption of objects-bodies-images, SEQUENCE #1 includes artworks that affirm the potency of images as acts or events. The series proposes we relate with the image as a practice because it “is never a thing, an inert object, but a praxis in which image and subject, mediated by a physical support, dialogue, consider and encounter each other”. The support or materials in SEQUENCE #1 are the body or bodies from which the images and their agencies emanate and are conjured up.

Making-thinking with the body and its appendices like the first recording technology and production of images. The words, noise, sounds, space, touch or movement provoke this apparition of images in another temporality, that of its hesitant formation which escapes standard interpretation. In this stress framework, we will present the work and research of Cris Celada, Ona Bros, Andrea Soto Calderón, Andrea González, Javi Álvarez, Lorea Alfaro, Olga Mesa, Alejandra Pombo Su, Carme Torrent and Emilio Tomé.