Shattering Appearances: Films by Teo Hernández

Curator Andrea Ancira García will be present to introduce and discuss the films featured in the programme. Her publications on the life and work of Teo Hernández will be also available in French & Spanish.

PROGRAM

TABLES D'HIVER
1979 I colour I Super 8 | sound | 39 minutes

An intimate chronicle of a winter. The days follow one another, the daily gestures, the meals. A reality that passes before our eyes and suddenly turns into an imaginary one. Tables that become carpets or mirrors, where the desired image is placed or reflected. Space and time constantly transformed by vision. In turn reality or dream.

NUESTRA SEÑORA DE PARIS
1982 | colour | 16mm | sound | 22 minutes

A queer portrait of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. This film is part of the Paris Saga series, it is a viewpoint of lights and shadows that articulates a vision that resists the patrimonial gaze of the city's tourism. According to French film critic Dominique Noguez, it’s visual whirlwinds could link Stan Brakhage and the paintings of lyrical abstraction.

PAS DE CIEL
1987 | colour | 16mm | silent | 29 minutes

This film is the result of the meeting, the confrontation, and the miraculous agreement between the weightless, vicious camera of Teo Hernandez and the improvisation of dancer-choreographer Bernardo Montet. A body between sea and sky, the silent presence of the wind, a few birds: elements of a fundamental mythology transformed into lyrical abstraction. “Dialectics of rhythm and movement without limits; feedback and coupling are carried out to such a degree that from that moment on all of Hernández's reflections, the whole theoretical body developed around the cinema, takes shape under the subtlety of the dancing image, and thus, a new cinematographic language is born.” -Mauricio Hernández

Artist Bio

Teodoro Hernandez was born in 1939 in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico. After studying architecture, he co-founded the C.E.C (Centro Experimental de Cinematografia), in Mexico City in the early 1960's. He moved to Paris in 1966 and for the next decade traveled extensively though Europe, Asia and North Africa making Super 8 films. Many of Hernandez’s films are marked by strong sweeping camera movements and single-frame shooting of places and spaces near and dear to him. He later flirted with feature-length works, including a queer take on Salomé, which heralded the emergence of a new movement in French experimental filmmaking, dubbed “l’École du corps” (“the School of the Body”).

"Until his death in 1992, Teo continued to create a work that was inextricably linked to his life, and his life and work were carefully recorded in his diary and in the preparatory files for his films. poetic prose where he tells us about his experience and what cinema means to him." -- Xochitl Camblor-Macherel

Curator Bio

Andrea Ancira García is a writer, editor and researcher based out of Mexico City, Mexico. She has conducted and coordinated seminars on Critical Theory and Marxism, Sound ethnographies and Sound Art practices, and Politics of the Archive in academic programs of museums and universities in Mexico. Her line of research focuses on the role of experimental artistic practices in the configuration of identities, sensibilities and social discourses. The perspective from which she explores these phenomena is based on multiple theoretical frameworks such as Marxism, the history of contemporary culture and politics, feminism, decolonial studies, among others. She has collaborated in academic and dissemination publications of social sciences and contemporary art.

This program is supported in part by the London Arts Council through the City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program.