Laida Lertxundi (b. 1981, Spain) makes films with non-actors – often friends – in and around Los Angeles, the city where she studied under James Benning and Thom Andersen, and where she has been living for a number of years. Shot under the blue Californian sky, her films feature the same topography as Hollywood cinema. Lertxundi questions cinematic conventions of representation and storytelling in her work at the same time that she proposes new associations between sound and image. In London, Beatrice Gibson (b. 1978, UK) addresses similar formal and conceptual concerns in her work, which is also shaped by the material constraints and aesthetic properties of 16mm film. Beyond the differences in the specific subjects of their films, the underlying themes in their work – speculative narrative, film as landscape, sound as material, the production process, collaborative practice – resonate in an uncanny way.
The screening will be followed by a conversation between the two filmmakers and curator Maria Palacios Cruz, who has written an essay on the films of Gibson and Lertxundi for the forthcoming issue of Sequence.
Footnotes to a House of Love, Laida Lertxundi (ES/US, 2007, 13′)
Agatha, Beatrice Gibson (UK, 2012, 14′)
The Room Called Heaven, Laida Lertxundi (ES/US, 2012, 11′)
The Tiger’s Mind, Beatrice Gibson (UK, 2012, 23′)
We Had the Meaning but Missed the Experience, Laida Lertxundi (ES/US, 2014, 8′)
Laida Lertxundi (Bilbao, 1981) is a filmmaker and artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her work, shot primarily on 16mm in and around Los Angeles, is made with people, landscapes and sounds, and employs a fragmentary approach to editing in which cinematic forms of storytelling are replaced by a focus on process and materiality. Lertxundi has been featured in solo exhibitions at Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid, and Alhóndiga, Bilbao, and shown in the Lyon Biennale, LIAF Biennial and Whitney Biennial. Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival; Rotterdam International Film Festival; MOMA, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; among others. Writing on her films has been published in Frieze Magazine, Film Quarterly, CinemaScope Magazine, The Nation, Art in America and Artforum. Lertxundi studied at Bard College (BFA) and the California Institute of the Arts (MFA) and teaches film at the University of California San Diego.
Maria Palacios Cruz (Spain, 1981) is a curator and former director of the Courtisane festival in Ghent. She teaches at Kingston University and Central Saint Martins College in London and has published on the work of artists such as Ben Rivers, Johan Grimonprez, Morgan Fisher, Laure Prouvost and Mati Diop. Together with Mark Webber and William Rose, she manages The Visible Press, a London-based imprint for books on cinema and writings by filmmakers.
Beatrice Gibson (b.1978) is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Investigating the utterances that form people and place, Gibson’s practice explores voice, speech, collective production and the problems of their representation. Gibson’s films have screened at numerous experimental film venues and at film festivals nationally and internationally including; Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives NY, LA Film Forum, Rotterdam Film Festival, London Film Festival, Images Festival, Migrating Forms, Courtisane, Oberhausen and more. She has been twice winner of the Rotterdam Film Festival Tiger Award for short film, most recently in 2013.
