MANUEL CORREA
INDEX
SHORT FILM/INSTALLATION
~ Building for Quantum (2025)
SHORT FILM
~ Agente Biológico (2023)
SHORT FILM
~ Fourhundred Unquiet Graves (2020)
SHORT FILM
~ Peñoncito (2022)
~ Límites de la Evidencia
SHORT FILM
SHORT FILM
SHORT FILM
OID
~ Oficina de Investigación Documental
SHORT FILM/INSTALLATION
Building for Quantum
2025
Co-directed
with Marina Otero Verzier
This machine represents the world's first modular quantum architecture, designed to form systems capable of solving problems far beyond the reach of today's classical supercomputers. By processing data in multidimensional spaces, it offers insights into the behavior of subatomic particles and mobilizes the foundational principles of quantum mechanics: superposition, entanglement, decoherence, and interference. Delving into the daily challenges of building this architecture, the camera goes behind the scenes to offer a glimpse into the manipulation of matter and the technological, human, and labor efforts involved.
Manuel Correa
Marina Otero Verzier
Installation design:
Manuel Correa
Marina Otero Verzier
Manuela Sancho
3D modelling:
Manuela Sancho
Sound design:
Emil Olsen
Project managment:
Ana Robles
Carlo Ratti
Building for Quantum was commisioned by the 19th Biennale Architettura, Ingelligens. Natural. Collective. 2025.
HD Video 23’31’ ’
Supporters:
Creative Industries Funds NL
BasQ - Basque Government
Columbia University GSAPP
SHORT FILM
Agente
Biológico
2023
Co-directed
with Marina Otero Verzier
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.
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
Venice Architecture Biennale
SHORT FILM
Peñoncito
2022
Peñón de los Baños,
Mexico City
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?
David Somellera
With
Audino Diaz
Facundo Rodríguez
Produced by
Emil Olsen
Manuel Correa
David Somellera
Sound edition & mix
Emil Olsen
Jacobo Zambrano
Assistant Editors
Signe Tørå Karsrud
Daniel Holten
Director, Editor, Camera
Manuel Correa
MANUEL CORREA SHORT FILM
SHORT FILM
Four Hundred Unquiet Graves
2020
high cross. Commissioned by Franco’s government, it possibly holds the world’s largest
mass grave with 33,843 bodies, including many victims of enforced disappearance. Despite 45
years since Franco’s death, the exact number of his victims burried in the site remains unknown.
Over a decade ago, the families of Franco's victims discovered their missing loved ones might
be buried there. Their quest for exhumation has faced systemic resistance from courts, media,
state institutions, and the Benedictine monks overseeing the site.
This short film was commisioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut and e-flux architecture.
Manuel Correa
Produced by
Emil Nygard Olsen
Sound edition & mix
Emil Nygard Olsen
ALEJANDRA jARAMILLO
NARRATION
maría selas
FILM
The Shape of Now
2018
Do you remember the war?
Ask seven people, and you will get seven different versions. The Shape of Now is a creative documentary that
addresses the challenges and paradoxes of historical memory.
Like Benjamin's Angelus Novus, this film is situated in the advancing present, yet keeping a gaze on the past. It looks the conflict in the eye, questions it, and doubts its supposed truths.
The Shape of Now had its world premiere in the Next Masters competion at the DOK Leipzig Film Festival.
Manuel Correa
Coproduced by
Emil Nygard Olsen
Augusto César Sandino
Original Music
Simón Mesa Giraldo
Sound edition & mix
Emil Nygard Olsen
Sebastián Munera
Location Sound
Francisco Londoño
Camera
Manuel Correa
John Jarlen Quiros
Angélica Toro
Colombia / Norway.
70 minutes, Colour
HD Video 71’15’’ 2018
MANUEL CORREA FILMS
FILM
#artoffline
2015
In 2015, making selfies is part of the experience of visiting a museum. Digital technology has completely transformed the experience of art forever; #ARTOFFLINE provides an insider's view of the contemporary art-world, and explores the significance of audiences choosing experience art primarily through digital devices.
This documentary illustrates the ways in which digital technologies are also creating new audiences, and a participatory culture that exists outside of traditional elite spaces for art. The artist and director Manuel Correa takes us behind the scenes, and provides a glimpse inside the minds that are already shaping the art of tomorrow.
#ARTOFFLINE had its world premiere in 2015 at Rotterdam International Film Festival .
Manuel Correa
Produced by
Emil Nygard Olsen
Coproduced by
Anna Kasko
Cavo Kernich
Original Music
Cayne McKenzie
Sound edition & mix
Emil Nygard Olsen
Asistant Director
Joseph Strohan
Jon Peters
Joseph Strohan
Mike Burnside
Camera
Maxime Cyr-Morton
Manuel Correa
Joseph Schweers
Editing
Emil Nygard Olsen
Manuel Correa
Joseph Schweers
Technical
Distributed by IndiePix Films
Norway. 60 minutes, Colour. HDVIDEO
FILM
Atlas of Disappearance
2018 - Ongoing
For over six years, Atlas of Disappearance has followed three families in their quest to reclaim the remains of their loved ones buried in the Valley. The film presents new evidence and visual materials that bring them closer to their lost relatives. The Documentary Research Office team—comprising artists, forensic architects, geographers, archivists, documentarians, and mathematicians—creates mathematical hypotheses, probabilistic algorithms, forensic cartographies, and architectural animations to reconstruct what was destroyed and digitally reveal the truth about Europe’s largest mass grave. The film juxtaposes the oral testimonies of families with virtual reconstructions of these hypotheses, waging a relentless battle against silence and oblivion.
The documentary leverages cutting-edge technologies to shed light on three cases involving families seeking answers about their disappeared relatives. Silvia, 50, leads the largest association advocating for exhumations. Mercedes longs to recover her father. And Fausto, an elderly man who has spent his life searching for his father’s remains, finally succeeded on August 20, 2023...while the remaining relatives lose hope as they wait.
Atlas of Disappearance was part of Berlinale Talent’s DocStation, Venatana CineMadrid and Zinebi Networking.
MANUEL CORREA ARCHIVES
ARCHIVES
Press
Peñoncito
“ En esta entrevistal, el director de cine habló sobre la memoria y su película más reciente “Peñoncito”, que también se relaciona con este tema y fue rodada en México.”
“Directed by young Colombian visual artist and filmmaker Manuel Correa, #artoffline premiered in 2015 and has been to international film festivals since 2016. It’s now 2020 and so this is no longer a new film. However, not much has changed in the art world in the past five years and with the new coronavirus, the issues Correa discussed then are worth our serious attention now. ”
“ As #artoffline explores, the Internet has been seen by artists either as a transformative tool (think Instagram) or as a roadblock (again, think Instagram). Yet even with the Internet’s ascendency, cinema is the only remaining mainstream art form of our culture.”
“The film started as an exploration of what it means to be able to create the past – and the role of verification. Because if you accept that you can implant false memories into people then how is our own autobiographical memory a reliable source for testimonies and truth-claims? In this sense, it is evident that we have no access to the past. We can remember the past, but every time you may remember something differently and memories may change. I am interested in the idea that the memory of the past is always created in the future. The past is ground for experimentation.”
“More than anything, The Shape of Now is about the process of creating historical memory: its promise and its fallibility. Correa interviews a logician, an arms dealer, a peace negotiator, journalists and neuroscientists as well as ex-combatants from all sides and, most touchingly, a group for the mothers of people who disappeared. All of these individuals are, in their own way, trying to piece together what has happened (or what they’ve done) and figure out why, so that they can move on.”
“Por estos días, y por los días pasados, y seguramente por los días siguientes, el gran reto será admitir que, para entender, habrá que dejar que el otro hable sin que necesariamente eso signifique asumir que lo que dice es cierto o correcto. Coexistir es, en resumidas cuentas, lo que propone Correa en su película.”
” ... Manuel Correa’s new film, The Shape of Now, takes on the gore-soaked mess that is Colombia’s civil war in a sly and inventive way: by casting a cool eye on the oddly surreal social landscape of the country as it is now, with the war officially over and the entire society attempting to move on.”
“One of the standout works of ARTBO was presented in the fair’s Artecámara section for emerging Colombian artists. London-based, Medellín-born Manuel Correa’s 70-minute documentary The Shape of Now ... ”
“...Qué pasó con los sobrevivientes de más de 50 años de conflicto interno? Esta es la pregunta que se propone resolver ‘La forma del presente’, del director Manuel Correa, de la mano con las víctimas que narran no solo su dolor, sino cómo lograron edificar a partir de él.”