blind cinema project
Cine ciego (Blind Cinema) is a multidisciplinary project that explores the need for visual interruption, a certain blindness in response to overexposure to images. From Malevich’s Black Square to Instagram’s BlackOut Tuesday, it examines how monochromy, emptiness, or pause are necessary to alter the way images unfold in the current viral/overexposure era, how a certain degree of blindness is involved in each phase of the aesthetic experience, and how the absence of image also awakens the awareness of the viewer.
The project includes the book and visual essay Blind Cinema, performative lectures (one or four sessions) and Blind Cinema meetings, the talk “No Image” with David Bestué, the audiovisual pieces “Fade to Blind” and “The Atlantic Woman,” and the audiovisual performance “Last Image | s i l e n c e” in collaboration with sound artist Haize Lizarazu.
blind cinema: book
The Blind Cinema essay journey through the gallery of monochromes and imageless films traverses four colors and four filmmakers: Jean-Luc Godard, the blind artist: the white screen of the moment of creation; Marguerite Duras, the monochromatic work: black blindness through absence/desire; Harun Farocki, the blind spectator: the red screen that starts the revolution; and Derek Jarman: total blindness, the blue virus as interruption.
Blind Cinema is a book but also contains one or more films that, like all others, will be projected mainly behind our closed eyes.
Cine ciego. Detener el flujo de las imágenes.
Marta Azparren
Libros de la Resistencia publisher
152 Pages
1st edition: February 2023
2nd edition: May 2023
ISBN: 978-84-15766-88-9
performative lectures
Blind Cinema project materials can be activated in the format of performative lectures and meetings based on the contents of the book, accompanied by film projections, live editing, or talks.
The performative lectures of Blind Cinema propose a cycle of commented projections and actions based on the topics and films analyzed in the essay, as an excuse to generate reflection on contemporary exhausted gaze, physical and symbolic blindness, and the need for a pause in the incessant flow of images to open up a new possibility for imaginal perception.
These formats have been held at Cineteca Madrid, Museo CA2M, Arts Santa Monica, Filmoteca Catalunya, Zumzeig, Xcèntric (CCCB), La Capella, Museo la Neomudéjar, Espai Nyam Nyam, Bòlit and Majordocs Festival.
Chapter of Miradas Habladas, the contemporary art podcast from Blueproject Foundation and Pas une Orange, dedicated to Blind Cinema (spanish):
performance «Last Image | s i l e n c e»
The performance Última Imagen | s i l e n c i o by Marta Azparren and sound artist Haize Lizarazu investigates, through a non-hierarchical and synesthetic relationship between sound and visuals, the possibility of a last image and a silence from which a new regime of seeing and listening can be articulated.
The last image resembles the story of the light at the end of the tunnel, the macula, nano-observation, a large pupil, or an interrupted eclipse. The technique of the image allows us to see the invisible, recreating what we call cinema. This last monochrome image would be like blinding the camera’s lens: a blind cinema.
We propose an immersive, anti-sublime, anti-spectacular experience in which an audience in shavasana (corpse pose) receives what they see with closed eyes and open ears, listening to the trace left by image and sound as they fade away.
films
Film-hypothesis on the real content of the 15 minutes of black screen in Marguerite Duras’ film L’homme atlantique: absence as a desire for image.
The “surplus of images” has plunged us into a blindness by accumulation. We have already seen everything; we are blind to images. Vision is canceled, but a new way of seeing is inaugurated.
«epojé» research project
Since October 2023, Marta Azparren has been a research artist in residence at the Multisensory Research Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, with the project “Epojé. Degree Zero of the Image,” focused on the application of neuroscientific theories in the reception of moving images, their absence, and the origin of imagination. The project is supported by the 2023 Research and Innovation Grant from the Government of Catalonia.
Episode of the podcast Vamos con todo, where Blind Cinema is discussed as the inspiration for El Conde de Torrefiel’s new piece, “The Light of a Lake.”