10/17/2025
Upcoming videos for the 16 Days / 16 Videos screening on Monday, 10/20, in the Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery are selected video works from Francesca Woodman and Carlos Martiel’s 𝘗𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘪 𝘍𝘶𝘨𝘢 (𝘝𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘗𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵).
Francesca Woodman’s works (1975-1978) description:
In a long-standing tradition, in which Abramović and Mendieta were pioneers, another short-lived American artist, Francesca Woodman, also explores her traumas and frustrations through the use of the moving image. Like his predecessors, Woodman produced a series of works for cameras in which the body is both present and absent. One could say that her exploration is about the phantasmagoria of the body, a word that has the same Greek root as “appearance”. In her work it is not merely accidental that the apparent (the visible) and the evanescent have the same linguistic origin. A body that is and is not is a body in the same state of conflict in which the video puts us, the conflict of a fleeting presence, in which all times are fused, in which memory captures itself as a fold: Borgesian paraphrasing the dreamer who dreams while dreaming, Woodman proposes the formula “remembering while remembering”, which leads to this pleasurable, and at the same time traumatic, appearance of oblivion and the disappearance of being.
Run Time: 13 minutes, 21 seconds (total)
Carlos Martiel’s 𝘗𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘪 𝘍𝘶𝘨𝘢 (𝘝𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘗𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵) (2013) description:
“I stand in the center of the main hall of Nitsch Museum with woolen threads sewn to the
front and back of my body. The threads sewed to my back all follow the same direction to a
single point on the wall. The threads extending from my torso expand in many directions,
creating the illusion that I’m being pierced by a vanishing point.”
(Commissioned and produced by Fondazione Morra)
Eugenio Viola on Carlos Martiel’s Punto di Fuga (Vanishing Point)
https://kunstaspekte.art/event/carlos-martiel-vanishing-point-2013-03?hl=en
The “vanishing point” and the perspective elaboration thus implied are the expression of the will to give the world a geometrical order produced by a western episteme aiming to rationalize it through logic mathematics terms. They both belong to a doctrine based on the anthropocentric concept of man as measure of the world, thus represented by Leonardo da Vinci in the Homo Vitruvianus that becomes the extreme visualization of the Neoplatonic correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. Starting from these considerations and dealing with a topical theme of western culture and
history of art, Carlos Martiel reverses the iconic outcome of the given image by using his body, he shows the deviation from the model, from the platonic essence aiming at the original pureness as well as the classic eidos in order to restore a version which is
controversially multicultural and hybrid.
The artist’s body turns into a landscape to be crossed and covered, his skin becomes a painting to be personalized and comprehended, his appendixes are branches with specific signs of belonging just hanging on them: the meeting place for several different codes. Action is an effort of junction which is translated into a geometrical-performative tension,
into grief and nearly mantric ecstasy of a body declined into its unshakable alterity. In Carlos Martiel’s work, the context of belonging and the awareness of his own body are always shown as being the mutable outcome of complex processes of attribution. The street and the public place are his favourite field for acting and operating since they are
granted by continuous ways of repossession.
The Cuban artist is focused on specific episodes aiming to intensify the perception of social inequalities by driving the public to adopt an ideological position which comprises signs of
a determined situation and precise context. As it often happens in the magmatic continent of South America, Martiel’s actions are bound to a strong expressive vividness, they assume denouncing overtones and a taste of rebellion, they recall unpleasant situations which are worrying signs of the deep existential discomforts fought by contemporary society. His harsh and dramatic works are characterized by a disturbing beauty and a nearly cathartic strength which drive them beyond the contextual or sociological remark. His works,
originated from a specific geopolitical localization, proceed inductively from the particular to the general since they refer, against our will, to global problems.
Run Time: 7 minutes, 7 seconds
