El duelo de una espina dorsal
An exhibition and film by Manuela de Laborde.
Some cuts are so subtle that they are almost imperceptible. Others are so marked that they distort everything. The cuts that shape a story sometimes appear to be definitive, like moments or breaks that mark a linear trajectory. But there are times when a thorn cuts in such a way that it reorganizes its order and changes the interpretation of what happened.
The backbone of this exhibition is cinema. An ideal cinema where film and its fiction stop and expand to think about its cuts, understand its form and question its image. In this cinema, movements become objects, images are folded and cut, and thoughts are enunciated as a river of consciousness that flows by its own inertia.
Through a film-essay titled La espina dorsal de un duelo and other objects that emerge from it, Manuela de Laborde, filmmaker and visual artist, seeks to shape the narrative. Like a chiropractor twisting a back to adjust the energies of a body, El duelo de una espina dorsal twists and reorganizes the linearity of her fiction, to make her own sssine.
In Manuela's sssine there is no projection, no screen, no seats, no corners. It is a concave place like the eye that makes everything part of it, even dreams. Within this sssine there are personal reflections that only make sense there, such as the wink to Henri Rousseau's The Snake Charmer, which Manuela interprets as an inverse metaphor of the theater of a cinema. Or the photographic representation of gardens that vanishes on the walls, alluding to the visits of the renowned French painter to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where it is said that he was inspired to represent distant and exotic worlds.
El duelo de una espina dorsal explores the impossibility of capturing the totality of a story in an image, or in an object, or in nothing. And so it weaves palm and celluloid, to continue expanding its understanding of cinema and its narrative.
José Esparza Chong Cuy
