23rd Loop Festival, “Miratges Mirages”

Elyla’s work appears in both the fair and festival strands of the 23rd edition of Loop Barcelona, an annual platform for the exhibition, discussion, and sale of moving image work that also incorporates a symposium. Referencing Nicaragua’s LGBTQ+ history and ancestral heritage, the artist’s films are less invested in the performativity of the medium than its potential as a transparent mode of documentation. Rumbling Earth (2024), exhibited in the fair by Galerie Barbara Thumm, reinterprets a sixteenth-century colonial-era folk drama, El Güegüense. In costumes inspired by the tale’s characters, an elaborately masked Elyla traverses a spectacular volcanic landscape, their “dance” reconnecting with the ancestral spirit of the place. In Torita-encuetada (2023), one of nine film installations dotted around the city, a traditional Nicaraguan fire ritual is reappropriated for a decolonial queer subjectivity.

In both, the blockbuster aesthetic leaves open the risk that these works will be received as exotic novelties. The desire for such seems as prominent now as it did in the 1990s, when artists such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña hyperbolically performed indigeneity in the museum and on film to subvert the ethnographic colonialist gaze and challenge its consumption of “others.” Fusco’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at MACBA—many of Barcelona’s museums put on moving image exhibitions to coincide with Loop.

The theme of this year’s festival, the first under the artistic direction of Filipa Ramos, is the open-ended “Miratges Mirages.” As Ramos explained in an introductory talk, the Catalan/English title was inspired by a 1976 Joan Jonas work and alludes to the mirages of artists’ cinema as forms of desire or the promise of dreams. Two early films by Jonas (Wind, 1968, and Songdelay, 1973) were installed in two ornate gold-and-marble rooms at the Museu Picasso, their black-and-white pixellated footage further washed out by the glare of the museum’s chandeliers. Purported connections in the festival literature between Picasso and Jonas were hard to see, as these early films are firmly rooted in the improvisational choreographies of 1960s and ’70s New York rather than the surrealism that inspired both artists. Other installations more obviously revolved around themes of ecology and indigeneity and picked up where Elyla’s work left off. 

Karrabing Film Collective’s Night Fishing With Ancestors (2023), at the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya, portrayed another colonial-era narrative: Captain Cook’s “discovery” of Australia. In Karrabing’s earlier films,the collective’s unique methods of storytelling sardonically reenact issues that impact its Indigenous members’ everyday lives, such as mining corporations’ invasion of their land in Australia’s Northern Territory. While Night Fishing does address the loss of marine biodiversity, its main narrative arc switches into parody. Collective member Elizabeth Povinelli, caked in zombie whiteface makeup, contributes a turn as the eponymous Cook in which “first contact” is staged as a DIY sketch played for laughs, the comedy undermined by its reliance on stereotypes. Its pointed lack of opacity made me wonder whether Night Fishing was a tongue-in-cheek riposte to the appetite for Karrabing films in an art system that does little to change the inequalities that underpin it.

Two films by Ana Vaz are put into dialogue with the avantgarde music of her father, Guilherme Vaz, in “ipsa sonant arbusta” (even the woods themselves echo) at Museu de la Música. A listening room is dedicated to his oeuvre while a recorded conversation between father and daughter, about the former’s work with Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon, where Ana was born, provides the soundtrack for A árvore (The tree, 2022). Repeated contemplative footage, on 16mm transferred to digital, shows windblown trees minutely altered by changes in light, the weather, or reddish filters. Guilherme’s “modal music” was informed by an immersion in the lifeworlds of Indigenous communities for whom “all music is modal.” (Modal music uses diatonic scales, which were the foundation of western music before tonality was discovered.) Unwittingly, perhaps, the privilege underpinning his ethical view of co-existence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples was also palpable. 

Apiyemiyekî?, the soundtrack of which features Guilherme Vaz’s A Noite Original (2004), was made in 2019 in collaboration with Egydio Schwade, an activist and educator involved with the first literacy programme with the Waimiri-Atroari people of the Brazilian Amazon. Vaz’s film superimposes children’s coloured pencil drawings from Schwade’s archive onto portentous, documentary-style black-and-white footage of a flowing river and the BR-174 highway which, in an allusion to its historical incursion into Indigenous territory, bisects the screen. As well as local flora and fauna, the drawings depict helicopters, guns, and knives that imply the violence surrounding the highway’s construction in the 1970s, when thousands of Waimiri-Atroari were massacred.1 The superimposed layers suggest the instability of the archive as testimony, and contrast its legislative framework with the intangible nature of the river’s witnessing. 

Natália Trejbalová’s Never Ground (2025) takes the viewer through the bowels of the earth, her camera giving the illusion of tunnelling softly, more creature than drill, through rocky and crystalline hollows. Fittingly installed in a newly refurbished gallery at the Casacuberta Marsans Collection, housed in a fifteenth-century former hospital for clerics, the film blends documentary shots of a vaporous volcanic terrain with those of an artificial landscape made of materials including oil and paraffin. This speculative fiction depicts a post-Anthropocene environment, yet a woman’s improvised hums and soprano-like echolalia endow the alien geology with a pleasurable sense of embodiment.

The mirages hovering on the horizon of the best works across the fair and the festival emerged from these intimate connections between human and nonhuman bodies. Their promise relates to filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán’s claim—at one of the symposium panels—that the “oneiric medium” of artists cinema can create “sites of healing and communality.”2 This did not always happen, but to imagine that it might is a venture worth taking in a world in need of both.