Since 2003, LOOP Barcelona has been dedicated to the discovery, promotion and acquisition of contemporary video art works. For its 21st edition, the renowned video creation festival has prepared an extensive programme of exhibitions, screenings, performances and discussions.

Manifesta 15 is thrilled to hold the screening of One Hundred Steps (Bárbara Wagner, Benjamin de Burca, 2020) on Thursday the 16th of November 2023 at the Manifesta 15 headquarters from 18.00 to 20.00. Working together for over a decade, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca produce videos and video installations in dialogue with other artists and collectives. The duo has developed a research method which is crucial for transmitting the frequently urgent, socially and historically determined content of their audiovisual investigation. This work premiered during Manifesta 13 Marseille, who co-commissioned it together with Visual Carlow.

LOOP Festival runs for 10 days, from the 14th to the 24th of November 2023, and includes screenings, exhibitions, concerts, talks and other live events at numerous venues around the city. LOOP Fair is born from a commercial intention and is one of the essential platforms for the production and exhibition of the critical thought generated by artists. This platform strives to re-examine traditional art fair models and methods of presentation by taking into account both the changing attitudes of viewing and interacting with art, and the particularities of moving image practices.

One Hundred Steps is an audio-visual collaboration of Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca references the work of Bob Quinn, the Irish filmmaker whose productions in the 1980’s (specifically Atlantean, a quartet of documentary films and accompanying book) were dedicated to deconstructing the hegemonic Eurocentric imaginary and elaborating on the role that North African cultures have played in the formation of Irish culture. Through an anti-colonialist approach, Quinn’s work remains an important historical document which is more relevant today than ever before. 

Wagner & de Burca’s film invites the viewer to enter its narrative through two distinct and seemingly mirrored chapters. The first is set at a sumptuous 17th century Anglo-Irish colonial manor of the landlord class, located in southwest Ireland, and the latter at a 19th century stately mansion built by a bourgeois French family, located in the centre of Marseille. Each of these houses carries the weighted atmosphere of its privileged history in their architecture and décor – a history now preserved, as both have become museums open to the public.  

Join us on the 16th of November at Manifesta’s headquarters at 18.00 for the screening of One Hundred Steps, an audiovisual piece marked by an urgent social and historical investigation. More information here.

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On the 23rd of November at 19.00 there will also be a screening of the film Soft Country (Alfonse Chiu, 2021) and a selection of Asian videoart as part of the LOOP Festival, in collaboration with Casa Asia.

Soft Country is a proposal about the creation of political memories. Asking the questions 'What does one get to remember?' and 'Who gets to forget?', this film programme presents five works by contemporary Southeast Asian artists who work with moving images to reflect on the relationship between country, language and history. Beyond the standard narrative boundaries of conventional fiction, each work acts as an essay, a testimony, and a poem that constantly reconfigures the artist's observation of being and becoming in the strong states of geopolitics - and imagining in its place a weak country of mutable implications.

Alfonse Chiu (Singapore/Taipei/New Haven) is a writer, artist and curator who works at the intersection between text, space and the moving image. Their practice investigates imaginaries of capital and ideologies shaped by media infrastructures and networks of economies to contemplate possible futures for bodies, society and the environment. They are the founder and director of the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM), a critical research and artistic platform that explores the themes and narratives of the urban condition to propose broader critiques of capitalism and the Anthropocene positioned in the Global South. In 2021 they were a colleague of e-flux magazine and in 2021-2022 associate curator of DECK. They are a finalist in the first Youn Climate Prize 2023, organised by The World Around. As a researcher, they have collaborated with the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University; the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore; and the Singapore Heritage Society. Their texts have appeared internationally in publications such as Hyperallergic, Ocula and Art Basel Editorial; and has received commissions from institutions such as the Asian Film Arxivi, the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art and the Sharjah Architecture Triennial Research Initiative. They are currently studying a master's degree at the Yale School of Architecture.

Video art programme

1.Kindred (2021) by Lêna Bùi (Vietnam), 8 min.

As an echo of cascading memories inherited from different lives, languages and worlds, Kindred (2021), by Vietnamese artist Lêna Bùi, is shown as a visual poem, bringing together the shared stories of different beings and communities in a continuous cycle of transmission and repetition. Meditating on the occasionally violent, but always profound implications between humans, non-humans and nature, Bùi excavates the prehistory of colonisation and modernisation to imagine our collective future as a continuous and cohesive narrative of the world.

2.Saudade (2019) by Russell Morton (Singapore), 21 min.

Saudade is an audio and visual archive narrated entirely in Kristang, a Creole language that emerged in colonial Portuguese Malacca in the 16th century. The film reimagines rituals and choreographies characteristic of early Eurasian kampongs in three acts: a Jinkli Nona song and dance, a scene between a shrimp fisherman and his wife, and a multicultural encounter with the Malay ghost Orang Minyak. Using folklore and myth as narrative anchors, Morton interweaves his personal identity and allegorical narrative with cinema to examine the origins of Eurasians.

3.Tarun (2020) by Tiyan Baker (Australia, Malaysia), 16 min.

Tarun was recorded during a long stay in Baker's mother's place of origin – a Bidayǔh village in Sarawak, Malay Borneo. Moving between banana plantations, jungles and rivers, the artist narrates the story of his mother's emigration in choppy and faltering bidayǔh. Tarun reflects on the complexities and impossibilities of language continuity and cultural survival in the face of capitalist colonialism in Sarawak.

4.The Wandering Ghost (2018) by Prapat Jiwarangsan (Thailand), 20 min.

Over the past couple of years in South Korea, thousands of Thai workers who were illegal immigrants have been deported back to Thailand, while thousands more have been sneaking across the border for both legal and illegal work. Calling themselves 'ghosts', they left their native country for a foreign country, whose language they don't know, to move towards an uncertain future and hide as specters to evade the authorities The film contemplates the situation of these workers, as well as visiting another generation of Thai immigrant workers from South Korea, an 80-year-old Thai veteran who fought in the Korean War.

5.After Nonoy Estarte, a certain Orpheus, and those flowers in Dahilayan that accompanied this other (2016) by John Torres (Philippines), 10 min.

Inspired by the drawings of an artist in the south, Torres sees paintings that represented the indigenous people's perspective on the origins of the world. The film is the story of our nation and basic things: water, plants, body and their own interaction through time.

Free entrance. Limited seating. Gustavo Gili Publishing House. C/ del Rosselló, 87-89, 08029 Barcelona