Screenings

DOK Leipzig Documentary Film Festival. 2018.
Bogotá International Film Festival.
(Bogotá, September 10-16)
Festival de Cine de Derechos Humanos de Ituango. Opening Film.
Ituango, November 2019
El Circulo Que Faltaba, Kadist Art Foundation 2018.
CAR Madrid, Centro de Acercamiento a lo Rural. 2019.
Centre for Research Architecture. Goldsmiths’ University of London. Free Seminar. 2019.
Cinematik International Film Festival. Piest’any, Slovakia. 2019.
Artecamara. ArtBo Art Fair. Bogotá, Colombia. 2019.
NYU Madrid, Invitated by Allen Feldman. 2019.
Fourth Fanon Rencontres + Focus on the Funk. (Birckbeck University of London, December 6, 2019).



The Shape of Now is part of Kadist Foundation’s Contemporary Art Collection.



Produced & Directed by
Manuel Correa

Coproduced by
Emil Nygard Olsen
Augusto César Sandino

Original Music
Simón Mesa Giraldo

Sound edition & mix
Emil Nygard Olsen

Asistant Director
Sebastián Munera

Location Sound
Francisco Londoño

Camera
Manuel Correa
John Jarlen Quiros
Angélica Toro

Colombia / Norway. 70 minutes, Colour





Film

~ The Shape of Now (2018)





"At first an insect works its way out of the ground – laboriously, trying to get its bearings, brushing the heavy sand from its wings. Coming out of the soil it pierces the surface of the planet and turns once around itself, exactly as if it was taking a look around the present it just crawled into. Manuel Correa’s experimental documentary is a lot like this industrious animal that has soil sticking to its body, whose eyes are still clouded and whose wings are still flapping slowly.

According to estimates around 200,000 people lost their lives in the 50-year Colombian civil war. Another 25,000 were kidnapped, many are still considered missing. When the peace deal between the government and the FARC rebels was made in November 2016, guns were banned from the conflict. But the country’s population have since faced the almost impossible task of having to agree on a common past. “The Shape of Now” illuminates this strenuous process and thus Colombia’s leaden present from very different perspectives. And just like the people of this country – the survivors, the grieving mothers, the historians and experts – this film, too, is still in first orientation mode."

Lukas Stern, DOK Leipzig






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.”

︎ Interview by Tomáš Hudák, for Desist Film, April 2020




“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.”

︎
Jenna Sauers, for Cultured Magazine, March 2020




“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.”

︎
Laura Camila Arévalo, para El Espectador, Noviembre 2019




” ... 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.”

︎ Michael Atkinson, for Progressive, May 2019



“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 ... ”

︎ Jenna Sauers, for Cultured, October 2019



“...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.”

︎ Valentina Valencia, Para El País, Octubre 2019






Mark

Directed by
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


Researchers
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




Screenings (selected)

2015. Bergen International Film Festival. Bergen, Norway
2015. Kabuso Kunsthal. Norway
2016. Bomuldsfabrikken Kunsthal. Arendal Norway
2016. Museo Tamayo. Mexico
2016. Lo Schermo dell Arte Film Festival. Florence. Italy
2016. Palazzo Grassi. Venice. Italy
2016. il cinema del carbone. Mantova. Italy
2016. Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín. Colombia
2016. A4 Centre for Contemporary Culture.  Slovakia
2016. TranzitDisplay Gallery. Prague Czech Republic
2016. Kunsternes Hus. Kunsthogskole i Oslo, Norway
2016. International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands
2016. Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver. Canada.
2016. Studium Generale Reitveld Academie. Bots, Bodies, Beasts. Amsterdam.
2016. Mengi. Reykjavík, Iceland.
2016. Museum Boijmans van Beunigen, Rotterdam. Netherlands
2019. Interlocutories Seminar. Spike Berlin. Germany.

Exhibitions

2015-16. 8th Norwegian Sculpture Biennial. Vigeland Museet, Oslo, Norway

2018. Fake Art. Fake Museum. Fake You. Norsk Nasjonal Museet. Oslo, Norway




Film
~ #artoffline (2015)





-“Contemporary art is at a standstill, and partially because of technology” -  

︎ Mohammad Salemy

“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.  Filmed in Vancouver, Köln, Colombia, Oslo and during the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary 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.”



“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.

︎ Napat Charitbutra, for Art4D, 2020




“ 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.

︎ Aaron Peck, for Canadian Art, 2017




“With the documentary #artoffline, shown as part of the Norwegian Sculpture Biennial, the director Manuel Correa seeks to challenge art’s problematic relationship with the Internet.”

︎ Erlend Hammer, for Kunstkritikk, 2015




”¿Qué sucede con el arte en la era del Internet? Los filósofos, artistas y curadores entrevistados en el documental Artoffline (2015) creen que la reproducción digital del arte lo puede liberar de un mercado de arte complicado y un sistema de exhibición desigual....”

︎ Artischock, 2016



Screenings
Bogoshorts Film Festival. 2022.


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









Film
~ Peñoncito.


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?



“ 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.”

︎
Laura Camila Arévalo Dominguez, for El Espectador, December 2022


Talbot’s dream (fragment)
110 x 110 CM (double sided)



Project 
~ Talbot’s Dream




Henry Fox Talbot or Nicéphore Niépce could never imagine what photography would become in less than two centuries. Their humble invention has taken us on a journey, from the infamous barred window to cruise missiles and point-clouds.
Once photography became digital, its superficial data could be read and interpreted by computers. The pioneers in image computation encouraged the prototyping of photo-guided cruise missiles. This system was planned to be similar to TERCOM, but its program used surveillance photographs rather than elevation maps. Inside these missiles was a computer that compared these images with photographs captured by the missile’s camera. The system proved too slow, and TERCOM took its place instead. Software and hardware evolution meant that machines have constantly increased their capacity to interpret and recognize the human world. Think of DARPA’s Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System.
Aided by algorithms, multiple digital photographs can be used to generate fairly accurate 3D models of most spaces and objects. Stereophotogrammetry can potentially be outsourced: multiple photographs of a specific object or space uploaded online by different users can be used to reconstruct 3D models. This essentially means that every photograph might be instrumentalized to generate a digital copy of the world for machines to understand.
Stereophotogrammetry might sound like a very sophisticated application of photography, but just give an iPad with Capture 123 to a 12 year old and you might immediately rebuff that misconception. While we are still very far from having a comprehensive digital copy of our constantly changing world, the implications of this technology for humans and non-humans are yet to be known. However, we can speculate that these developments will bring about changes in the way we will experience and conceive physical spaces in the near future. The real and the virtual might overlap in yet to be discovered ways, two synchronized, parallel worlds might ensue: A physical world for humans and other animals together with its digital carbon copy for non-human subjects.  
In October 1833, confusing naturalist depiction with art, William Henry Fox Talbot had the urge to invent something that could replace his unskilled drawings of Lake Como’s scenery. His goal was perfectly captured in the ominous title of his book: The Pencil of Nature. For him, photography the natural world’s path to self-depiction. Nearly two centuries later, we can update his naive observation: today, it's slowly becoming evident that the scientific and military deployments of photography have aided the ultimate virtual re-presentation of our world in multi dimensionally accurate ways far beyond Talbot’s dreams.
This project will scan multiple forms of dead natural subjects and digitize them both for human enjoyment and machine consumption.



This project was made in collaboration with Miguel Mesa Posada and Martin Zellerhoff.

The models are presented as a large data visualization photo-sculpture. (Installation view at This is The Sea, ArtMonteCarlo 2018).