The Loop festival, Barcelona's most important event for video art, returns to the city with its 21st edition and places the environmental crisis at the center of the program. The audiovisual piece Anòxia. A constant prelude, by the artist Fito Conesa, is selected this year to begin the event that will run from Tuesday, November 14th to Friday, November 24th. The "poly-poetic" portrait, (political and poetic, in Conesa's words), is composed of an opera in three acts that explores the current problems of the Mediterranean and the degeneration of the ecosystem. “It is a program that looks at our context and at the themes that challenge us all,” said Victoria Sacco, artistic director of Loop, during the presentation of the festival at La Casa Elizalde. The recovery of memory, the rewriting of art history based on the work of women artists and the impact of new technologies on everyday life are other topics that will also be explored in this edition.
The inauguration will take place at the Tecla Art Center in L'Hospitalet, and will also feature a musical performance where the author of the work, Fito Conesa, and the singer Claudia Schneider will perform some musical pieces from the work. The sound action of the Chilean-Venezuelan DJ Niña Jacarandá will also be added with her Sexpiritual set.
Among the 116 artists participating in this edition, the participation of filmmaker Pau Faus, author of the documentaries Alcaldesa and Fauna, stands out. In his work The Machine and the Flower, Faus invites an analysis of the impact of new technologies on daily life. The piece collects the reflections of the philosopher Juan Arnau, defender of humanism in the era of technological distraction, from inside and outside the Alba synchrotron, a scientific infrastructure located in Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona.
On Saturday the 18th, the artist and writer Juana Dolores will present her video performance Dear ChatGPT, at Casa Seat. The work is the result of Dolores' interaction with the artificial intelligence application created by OpenAI in 2022. Inspired by the historic Seat Strike of 1971 in the Zona Franca, the piece demonstrates how technologies that appear apparently neutral end up adopting an ideology .
In relation to the recovery of memory and on the occasion of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet coup in Chile, six historical works made on video by the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld between 1979 and 1989 will be presented. The exhibition that will take place in Casa Amèrica Catalunya includes A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement, a founding work of Rosenfeld's career.
The Loop festival will tour for ten days a network of 58 spaces in the city, which include the Picasso Museum, the Frederic Marès Museum or the Joan Miró, Vila Casas, Enric Miralles and Cultural CdR foundations.
