In collaboration with a group of EINA students and alumni, einaidea has created the graphic identity of LOOP Barcelona 2023, which takes place from 14–24 November. The project stems from an immersion into the LOOP archive, which gathers original documents from more than two decades of activity of the fair and the festival. A three day-long workshop involving a group of about twenty collaborators allowed for the emergence of a diversity of media—still in circulation or already obsolete—for the dissemination and presentation of video art: cassettes, dvds, cd-roms, hard drives and papers from artists that have attended or approached LOOP events; as well as event records and recordings that the organisation’s team has used to define programme lines or build narratives for each edition. The workshop allowed to examine preview copies of film works by contemporary artists and historical compilations, including LOOP’s very own publications dedicated to the writing of key artists in the field of video art.
The collective act of diving led to dazzling associations and speculative re-readings, which crystallised into a documental fiction titled Láser Madre. The spontaneous unfolding of this fiction was catalysed, specifically, by revisiting Mary Lucier’s script for her video performance Fire Writing (1975), which triggered the experiment leading to the conclusion of the workshop; the film essays After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid (2002), by Yvonne Rainer, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Éloge de l’amour (2001), viewed simultaneously; and the text „A to Z of HF or: 26 introductions to HF“ (2009) by Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, read as a breviary to the attention of future authors.
Articulated under the concept Láser Madre, the visual and graphic elements of LOOP Barcelona 2023’s identity refer to a document of the hypothetic history of video art, or, what writer and filmmaker Jalal Toufic would call the exploration of „a parallel branch of the multiverse“. Láser Madre is a film piece that could have existed in another Anthropocene, not exactly this one: an abstract film that narrates the vicissitudes of a beam of red light when going through multiple casings made of plastic and glass. The gentle and exaggerated movements of such light go from hand to hand and from a visual tool to another: captured by a camcorder and reproduced on a plasma screen, which at the same time is filmed by a smartphone whose record is, then, edited on the cloud. Láser Madre is an intergenerational crafting where each frame is a poster. The scenes that follow one another suggest masses of tender emotions, cellular life episodes, attempts at domestic melancholy expressionism, potential visions of queer psychedelia, landing of UFOs, nocturnal flights seen at a distance through an infrared light. All of this in silence. The scenes are susceptible of translation, redefinition, through fragments of found language that sometimes add-on to them as subtitles. Láser Madre is a collective voice-over, a simulation of a cult film which almost exists.
Láser Madre has been co-created by Ignasi Ayats, Manuel Cirauqui, Ana Habash, Mireia Molina Costa and Alexandre Viladrich, with the collaboration of Flavià Boleda, Esteban Gutiérrrez Silva, Júlia Izaguirre, Haji Kareem, Andrea Linares and José Nerín; and with the help and complicity of the entire LOOP team.