Agrilogistics + Bliss point, Gerard Ortín

DIALOGUES WITH Extramission: The Capture of Glowing Eyes 

Agrilogistics, Gerard Ortín Castellví, United Kingdom, Spain, 2022, 21 min

Bliss point, Gerard Ortín Castellví, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, 2023, 26 min

Artist and filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland’s exhibition Extramission: The Capture of Glowing Eyes in Tabakalera Exhibition Hall 2. To complement this exhibition, we have organised two screenings in the cinema, allowing the public to approach her work from another perspective. The first session includes films by Rinland, while the second is dedicated to the filmmaker and artist Gerard Ortín.

Thematic resonances emerge in both their films and, more significantly, in their creative processes. Their films are characterised by investigation, in which cinematographic language – from sound to editing and the movement of the camera – takes on the same importance as the themes they address. Both Rinland and Ortín achieve an exceptional harmony between form and content.

Gerard Ortín is currently doing a PhD at Goldsmiths (London) on the technologies and ecologies of diets. This practical PhD involves the making of three films, each dealing with a phase of the food cycle: consumption in Future Foods (2021), production in Agrilogistics (2022), and distribution in Bliss point (2023). 

In this session we will be able to see the second and third films in Gerard Ortín’s trilogy on diets, and we will have the opportunity to talk to Ortín himself in order to learn more about his work processes, which combine research and filmmaking practice. 

Agrilogistics offers a closer look at the recent technological transformations within contemporary industrial agriculture. Tulip bulbs, chrysanthemum cuttings and tomato crops are controlled by processes using cameras and algorithms that regulate their growth. By day, the greenhouse becomes a kinematic device, an automated set for the mass production of flowers and vegetables. By night, the factory stops: exterior and interior merge in a dreamlike space where plants, animals and machines are woven together to form a new eco-technological entity.

Bliss Point introduces us to the accelerated food supply chain with its new techno-capitalist processes. The film takes us inside ghost kitchens, onto advertising sets and into AI-managed warehouses. It takes us on the journey of a deliveryman who rides through the city on an electric bicycle to an industrial container where hamburgers are produced and laboratories where vegan steaks are 3D printed.  In a warehouse, algorithm-controlled robots process shopping baskets in an automated way, while in a laboratory, vegan steaks are 3D printed. Based on the concept of optimal palatability – the perfect amount of salt, sugar and fat to maximise pleasure – Bliss Point reveals the intersections between automation, human labour and the aesthetics and politics of food. 

*The screening of the two films will be followed by a public conversation with the author, Gerard Ortín.