La expresión del ciego + Those that, at a distance, Resemble Another, Jessica Sarah Rinland

DIALOGUES WITH Extramission: The Capture of Glowing Eyes 

• Expression of the Sightless, Jessica Sarah Rinland, United Kingdom, 2016, 7 min
• Those that, at a distance, Resemble Another, Jessica Sarah Rinland, United Kingdom, Argentina, Spain, 2019, 67 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.

Extramission is one of the first theories of vision, and this concept is also the starting point of the first film session dedicated to Jessica Sarah Rinland, where the director explores vision. Rinland wondered what the experience of art is like for someone who cannot see and filmed David Johnson, who went blind when he was nine years old, exploring a Victorian sculpture with his hands. The result is Expression of the Sightless, a beautiful film shot in 16mm where Rinland tries to convey the same experience that Johnson is going through: a fragmentation of the sculpture focusing on Johnson’s hands. In fact, it could be argued that the protagonists of Expression of the Sightless are the hands, and Rinland actually makes reference to the film The Expression of Hands by Harun Farocki. 

Hands are also the link between Expression of the Sightless and Those that, at a distance, Resemble Another. But in the case of this second film, the real protagonist is the ivory of an elephant and its replica. The director often links this film to Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, which makes reference to the fact that we are nothing but replicas of the DNA of our ancestors. This begs the question: what is the original? Rinland proposes a portrait of different museum curators and the meticulous way they carry out their work, while the common thread is the process of the director herself making a ceramic replica of an elephant ivory. In the film, the sound is particularly worthy of note. Through different conversations of the people involved in the processes and music, we imagine the collective nature of this type of work and of cinema itself. 

Jessica Sarah Rinland will present her films and we will be able to chat with her.