GESTURES TO BREAK AN IMAGE

Between December 2022 and March 2023, more than 50 people died at the hands of the police and military during anti-government protests in several cities across Peru. Living in Barcelona, filmmaker Mayra Villavicencio watches her country from afar. As she virtually roams the streets of Lima via Google Street View, her gaze falls on the signs of the State’s apparatus of repression, omnipresent in the scenery: surveillance cameras that lead her to images of the murders perpetrated by the armed forces. Moved and shocked, her silent voice written in subtitles contrasts with the sound of the news praising loud and clear the installation of these instruments of control in the capital. While these recordings are proof of repression, they also produce a landscape haunted by the innocent dead and eventually blur the vision of those looking at them. Which raises the question: what should be done with these images? Using artificial intelligence software, the filmmaker and researcher hunts down the presence of the armed forces and deletes them in a series of actions revealed live. Identify. Circle. Erase. Save new file. Then repeat the operation until nothing but the invisible shadows of these armed silhouettes remain on the bare tarmac, which goes from being the background to the foreground. By freeing them from this repressive presence, Mayra Villavicencio counteracts the inherent and relentless violence of these CCTV images, and rethinks the relationship with reality brought about by the so-called transparency of this indiscriminate and uniform recording. Behind the aesthetic intervention, a symbolic operation can be understood, a form of assumed cinematographic sabotage: “breaking” an image to be able to look at it again – differently.
Louise Martin Papasian