Los Angeles Filmforum and LA OLA present

Valentina Alvarado Matos: Collage Traces and Shards

Sunday March 26, 2023, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 W. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

In person: Valentina Alvarado Matos

Tickets: $12 general, $8 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

At https://link.dice.fm/ufafb47984e7

Masks are still required at Filmforum shows - N95 or KN95.

For the two-day symposium Precarity in Cinema, coming later this week, the artist Valentina Alvarado will be coming to Los Angeles from Spain.  Filmforum and L.A. OLA are delighted to to host her first solo program in the United States.

Filming the outer (landscape/territories/geographies) and the inner (studio life, hands, affections) is a constant conversation Valentina Alvarado has with her camera. Her practice focuses on collage, understood as a vessel that houses elements like paper, film, ceramics, and multiple media. She thinks from and with the image and its materiality, always traversed from a look that revolves around the landscape, belongingness, and matter.

Valentina Alvarado Matos (1986, Maracaibo)

Her pieces have been shown at Conde Duque, Oberhausen, Salzburger Kunstverein, Fabra i Coats, Arts Santa Mònica, Viennale, IFFR, Punto de Vista, Xcèntric, SF Cinemateque, (S8), LOOP Festival, Cineteca Madrid, and Filmoteca de Catalunya, among others. She has been a resident at La Escocesa, Cultura Resident, The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, and Matadero Madrid. Her films are part of the catalog of the distributor Light Cone.  Currently she is an artist in residence at Hangar, Barcelona. https://www.valentinalvaradomatos.com/

“The collages of Alvarado's films have as an outstanding characteristic that they record their own construction with their hands, which repeatedly appear in the field. It is not just a question of revealing the mechanisms of the creation of the work but of representing her constant recreation of herself and her place in her world as an immigrant. In this way, the image is also presented as the result of an activity that is not "fixed" but rather in movement of the film. The clippings with which she creates compositions in front of the camera do not end up stuck on any paper.

“Alvarado also makes use of a characteristic resource of the search for a subjective gaze of the French Impressionist avant-garde: the intervention and distortion of the image interposing elements between the filmed object and the camera. The medium that he uses for this purpose are glasses on which he pours oil to create the effect he seeks. He also paints on them, "remaking" by hand the image that is mechanically recorded on the film support. This includes, at various levels, the subtle intervention of his filmed self-portrait.” – Pablo Gamba, desistfilm

Special thanks to L.A. OLA; Noraeden Mora Mendez, and Erin Graff Zivin.