ExÓrbita: Short films session + Performance

Virtual reality has slipped through the world's cracks and reached the most intimate corners of our privacy, penetrating our bodies. The world folds in on itself, watching and imitating itself, reproducing itself ad nauseam without recognising itself. This session of short films endeavours to address the symptoms and rituals of this encounter between the physical body and the virtual body. Identity dissolves when faced with the impossibility of capturing and perceiving the world in depth. Cinema, that accomplice of pretence, takes charge of its technology and wonders about the fragile balance between the human, swaying between the material and the digital world.

One thousand and one attempts to be an ocean (Yuyan Wang, 2021)

Filmmaker Wang Yuyan's short film dives into the chaotic sea of the Internet to portray the fragmented nature of human experience. A flood of images and minimalist music force the audience to oscillate between the loop, the immersive repetition that seduces them and invites them to submerge themselves in the circuit, and the impossibility of handling such a huge amount of information. Worn out, the only thing left to do is to abandon oneself and drift around in superficiality.

Fest (Nikita Diakur, 2018)

A rave. Deliberately grotesque, rudimentary animation, a gap, a food truck and digital errors.

Les Dieux du Supermarché (Alberto Gonzáles Morales, 2022)

In a world obsessed with #bodypositive, this short film obsesses over the body of the perfect man. As we browse internet archives, we experience humour, frustration and desire in pursuit of this unattainable fantasy to question our cultural obsession with physical hegemony.

The very eye of night (Maya Deren, 1958)

In the darkness of the night, the dream world depicts dancers breaking free from the earth's surface, sailing into space, breaking through gravity and flowing beyond the dimension of their bodies.

Careless Reef Part 4: Marsa Abu Galawa (Gerald Holthuis, 2004) 

Images of the reef's fauna and flora, sharp shapes and dazzling colours frantically throwing themselves on top of one another to the beat of the music of the Egyptian Abdel Basset Hammouda. An electric dream in which the ocean's calm and anguish live side by side.

Black and White Trypps Number Three (Ben Russell, 2007) 

Crammed together in a fever of rock ecstasy, the audience freak out into a collective trance revealed only for split seconds when they are lit up by the show's flashing lights. Youthful delirium takes centre stage in the experience of bodies mingling to transcend space in community.

Performance by qbonito colectivo

The session will be brought to a close by the qbonito dance group performing a dance number in the projection space, in which they seek to explore the concept of circularity by surpassing the body, returning to the physical and digital body that comes through the screen to end up dancing.