Mario Tursi
Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas on the set of "Medea”
Enrico Appetito Archive
1969

[x]

Not so long ago, I began exploring the work of Armenian filmmaker and theorist Artavazd Peleshian. So far I’ve watched several of his short films: “Վերջը / The End” (1992), “Կյանք / Life” (1993), “Բնիկներ / Inhabitants” (1970), “Մենք / We” (1969).

Each of these short films (essays?) possesses the same primordial, pre-verbal impressionistic quality, one that evokes a kind of raw intimacy, almost painful it its honesty and transparency.

“With a melodic rhythm of camera, editing and bittersweet classical music, Pelechian and Vartanov raise their film to the level of a true symphony – the symphony of our existence.” — IDFA

You can watch the films for free on YouTube:

[Life] [End] [Inhabitants] [Seasons of the Year] [We]

Juan Santana
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) installing Reticulárea
Caracas, 1969

[x]

”Reticulárea (literally, “reticule area”) is an idea; it is a metaphor and a microcosm for various natural and social universes; it is, as María Elena Ramos has written, both “geometry” and “the poetic disruption of that geometry”; it is and is not architecture, sculpture, a drawing without paper, a public space woven by Gego and privately, if only momentarily, un-woven and re-woven by the mind of the individual viewer”

Melina Kervandjian, Gego’s Reticulárea: Transcending Space and Time

Ph: Paolo Gasparini
Gego’s Reticulárea
Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas
1969

[x]

Agnes Martin
Loving Love
1999

[x]

Bruce Nauman
Think
1993

Half a blanket under, half over; fever; cement; damp; sweaty hair; innoscriptions on the walls scratched with fingernails -
names, dates, small covenants; the same nightmare opening holes with the same torch: 'tonight', 'tonight', at dawn, 'tomorrow'.

Who will be left here to remember us when the key is heard in the lock and the long chain is dragged on the endless white where, on one side, the last cigarette we'd thrown down still smokes.

Yannis Ritsos, Piraeus Detainees' Transport Section, from Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems, ed. Nikos Stangos

Yvonne Sauphar
Venezuela; Wayuu
1930-1939