WUNDERBLOCK

SYNOPSIS

In Valencia (Spain), a woman paints portraits of a blind musician from the writings of another woman who listened to recorded and exposed vital testimonies of the blind man. A man records the pictorial process on video, while studying the human body as the political incarnation from the ideas of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, questioning knowledge representation policies.Through the video, the man discovers an archaic gesture in the body of the woman painter, one of the oldest gestures represented by humanity, which links the Histories of Art and War. The painter and the filmmaker then decide to go out together in search of the represented gesture, moving the visual chronicle from the painting on memory of the two oldest neighbourhoods of Valencia, to the museum of the Glyptoteca, in Munich (Germany), and from there to the Greek island of Egina, where the Temple of Aphea is located, origin of the plundered sculptural collections and of the gesture now held by the German museum. Their work will continue together with the inhabitants of the island, with whom they will experiment around the act of communication, the memory, the body exposed in front of the others and the experience of Community. Your trip will take you to Strasbourg, to Jean-Luc Nancy’s house.

CONCEPT

WUNDERBLOCK (160’) (2018). Is it possible to document, cinematographically, a real artistic production process? The thesis defended by WUNDERBLOCK says: No.

WUNDERBLOCK is a videographic documentary created by Alfonso Legaz, belonging to the project 20 MIRRORS HAPPEN that the Spanish artists Alfonso Legaz and Andrea Garay develop in common between 2015 and 2020. This cinematography, together with the rest of the project materials, investigates around the concept of “exposition” (of one singularity before another, individual, people, collectivities, etc), deconstructed by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1986), who actively participates in the project and who in this documentary dialogues with the artists at home from Strasbourg when visited by both. Addressing the problem of “exposition” in a documentary cinematographic process implies assuming that this “exposition” to others does not have a substance that allows it to be presented, or (re) presented, in any way, and this includes cinematographic representation.

This documentary videographic questions the documentary cinematographic tradition that from the 40s or 50s of the 20th century to the present day, has produced documentary films stating that they constitute audiovisual documents by which the public can understand what the production process consists a real art-work. This aforementioned tradition includes productions carried out by filmmakers who film fine artists producing their work of art (mainly painters), and ranging from H-G. Clouzot-Picasso, to Farocki-Sarah Shumann, through Víctor Erice-Antonio López, among others. All of them are cinematographic pieces awarded in important documentary festivals of international level. Faced with this lack of ontology that has never been addressed, or better, avoided by the hegemonic aesthetics and who constitute them, which is a reductionist way of presenting the artistic activity and the body of the other, of endowing it with a sense and a meaning falsified, thereby creating homogenized consensuses without critical value, antidemocratic consensuses where what cannot be visually presented is eliminated, that is, the dimension of mystery that human existence involves, the human unconscious thought from reason, the psychic life of the artist who produces the artwork (since the psychic life is not recordable as a visual document, it is always suppressed in the form of documentary cinema or, in the worst case, scripted), against this, WUNDERBLOCK poses the impossibility to carry out that visual document and the acceptance of this limitation, and of the aesthetic consequences that derive from it, as an inescapable ethic for the real documentary filmmaker. It opposes this hegemonic aesthetic by suggesting the alternative of exploring a vital sense always to come, politically active and external to the singular body but fused with it: being-in-common as the center of the community experience, which activates communication and be individual. Faced with a dominant one in the male tradition of painters documented by the cinema, WUNDERBLOCK is carried out with a long pictorial production of a female artist.

WUNDERBLOCK is structurally conceived as a memorial-archaeological (cinematographic) record of a painting process (and by extension of an entire artistic project) that cannot achieve its purpose because documentary cinema does not achieve its purpose of converting reality into a document, generating in change their own fictional documents, their own meanings and meanings from the real event: this implies an ethical responsibility. The “open montage” structure is based on a palimsesst model: Wunderblock is a short text belonging to Psychoanalytic Theory (“Notiz über den Wunderblock”, 1925. Sigmund Freud), by means of which Freud equated human memory with the operation of this children’s game, the magic blackboard, or Wunderblock. The cinematographic montage is treated based on the nature of this artifact: a symbolic artifact, useful to explain the functioning and construction of individual memory, the scene of writing and the human psyche. Alfonso Legaz designs a complex device through which, he himself lets between one and two years pass without seeing his own recorded images before mounting them, many never saw them during the recording process, in order to build a form of memory where the phatos associated with the instant of recording would have completely disappeared, and in this way, the montage would be critical of its own memory, with its lack of the truth of the facts.