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SHORT FILM

Agente
Biológico

2023


Co-directed
with Marina Otero Verzier

The Almeria landscape bears the imprint of the terraforming processes carried out in Spain by the Franco regime.
The architectures of the colonization towns and infrastructural projects erected at the time were means to convert bodies into laborers and landscapes into resources to be exploited. Their logic persists to this day, prominently displayed in the sprawling network of greenhouses that span hundreds of kilometers and produce the food that sustain us: tomatoes, zucchinis, peppers, watermelons. The plastic skins that build them wrap around the bodies of those who work tirelessly in the service of the production chain. Each is specialized in discrete but interconnected operations: planting, pollination, pest control, and harvesting. Absorbed in the familiarity of their tasks, they perform a choreographed dance every day in the factories where bumblebees are produced; in the rows of zucchini where humans work with repetitive manual movements, fueled by energy drinks; in the sheds where tomatoes are sorted; in the areas that accumulate discarded wrinkled skins, once greenhouses. Despite automation's tendency to mold workers into disciplined beings, their dances render bodies as generative mediums of embodied knowledge, places of agency and desire.



CURATORS
Eduardo Castillo Vinuesa and Manuel Ocaña


Biological Agent was commisioned by the Spanish Pavillion at the 18th Biennale Architettura, 2023.

HD Video 24’45’’ 2023


Installation in the Spanish Pavillion, 18th
Venice Architecture Biennale
Installation in Casa de la Arquitectura, Madrid
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SHORT FILM

Peñoncito
2022


Peñón de los Baños, 
Mexico City

Local elder Don Facundo Rodriguez attempts in vain to recall the story of the day he discovered a human skull in his backyard which was later revealed to belong to the earliest known inhabitant of the Americas.

With a sense of dread, he instead remembers encountering a crying legless woman hovering in mid-air near the dig site, calling to his mind a witch that is known to appear and disappear in Peñon to mark significant occasions. The 90-year old still carries a grudge towards his late cousin Pedro Cedillo who delivered the skull to the museum of anthropology without his consent. Now deceased, Pedro Cedillo himself is impossible to trace on account of there being many Pedro Cedillos buried in the local cemetery. In Manuel Correa’s odd chronicle of rumors and distant memories, questions and answers play tricks on each other - All of this invites us to ask, how much of our own history is fiction?



Based on Research by
David Somellera

With
Audino Diaz
Facundo Rodríguez


Produced by
Emil Olsen
Manuel Correa
David Somellera

Sound edition & mix
Emil Olsen


Location Recordings
Jacobo Zambrano


Assistant Editors
Signe Tørå Karsrud
Daniel Holten


Director, Editor, Camera
Manuel Correa







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