Exhibition 'Counterinformation: Video-Nou / Community Video Service. The gesture of filming. Video in the MACBA Collection'

What's it about

We present a new show from the MACBA Collection, dedicated to the presence of video and articulating three moments and contexts of the moving image, embodied in three proposals: Counterinformation: Video-Nou / Community Video Service, Ecos. Videos from the Han Nefkens Foundation donation, and Pere Portabella: the committed gaze. These three initiatives integrate into the same constellation of practices that understand video as a form of attention to reality: it is not only about recording, but also about activating gazes, presences, and narratives often situated at the margins of official history. This is how in Counterinformation: Video-Nou / Community Video Service, the audiovisual device operates not only as a recording tool, but as a situated and collective practice, inseparable from the social contexts in which it emerges. This material collects social and political realities that stratify in a key moment of historical reconstruction and information accumulation, the first years of the Transition, and claims them from a critical perspective. The camera becomes a space of interlocution and co-responsibility, where communities participate actively in the production of their own image and in the construction of an archive that is, at the same time, memory and process. The video works presented in Ecos. Videos from the Han Nefkens Foundation donation prolong this same concern from the realm of contemporary artistic practice. These pieces incorporate contemporary and counter-narrative languages: the texture of the image becomes more experiential, narration ceases to be linear, experimentation is worked on, and juxtaposition languages are explored. Through diverse formal strategies, they approach the intimate, the social, and the political as territories of experience, configuring video as a place of escort and critical thought. Added to this journey is also Pere Portabella: the committed gaze, a screening program dedicated to the filmmaker's films within the framework of 'Acció Portabella'. A selection that allows us to expand the set of registers around video and the moving image present in the museum's collection and brings us closer to the radicality of Portabella's cinema. A radicality that subverts narrative forms of film tradition and with a certain political gaze. Counterinformation: Video-Nou / Community Video Service, Ecos. Videos from the Han Nefkens Foundation donation, and Pere Portabella: the committed gaze can be understood as three capsules that, from different contexts and moments, explore the critical potential of the moving image to think about the relationship between document, testimony, and experience. Understanding video as a documentation platform —even in its most expanded forms— implies, at the same time, recognizing its relational condition. Any recording practice presupposes a collectivity, which this proposal for presenting the MACBA Collection wishes to appeal to.

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