The work was available on our platform only for the period of the screening.
“If the eye were an animal, its soul would be the sight” (00:07:59) by Marc Samper Vidal, Spain, Germany, 2021
The visionary journey, “If the eye were an animal, its soul would be the sight”, is an experimental-ecstatic itinerary that superimposes images of present-day Berlin with images found on old VHS tapes. The film reflects on the way we consume images in the context of the global mass media and how these processed images saw on-screen shape our interiority. Violence, war, consumption, and leisure are juxtaposed in a solution of continuity in which everything is diluted.
Bio
Marc Samper studied philosophy at the University of Barcelona (UB) and a master’s degree in Film Studies and Contemporary Audiovisual Culture at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF).
This last year, from October 2020 to April 2021 he had a scholarship as Artist in Residence at Urban Nation Berlin. In the framework of the same, she realized the Video-art and installation project The Hanging gardens or the virtuality of the events. Haiku on screen.
Always trying to combine his work as a videographer and filmmaker with his own projects, in 2015 he travels to Greece to shoot what will become his first feature film, Marathonas. There, coming into contact with the music scene surrounding the Labyrinth Musical Workshops in Crete, he has the opportunity to shoot a small experimental documentary about Ross Daly and his vision of modal music, Laberint.
Since then he continues to make short video-art pieces as well as photography and digital artworks.
Feeling inspired by filmmakers such as Nathaniel Dorsky, Stan Brakhage, or Val del Omar, Marc has always been interested in working the image to seek a displacement of consciousness from different phenomenological parameters. More than in the language itself, Marc is interested in the voids that circulate through it and from which one can access a “vision” from which to recompose reality and create new series of thought.
Director Statement
I am a Filmmaker and Visual Artist from Barcelona, currently based in Berlin. My work is produced, in an open and integrative way, in the fields of Video Art, Experimental cinema, Photography, Digital and New Media Art, and Installation.
Having studied a degree in philosophy at the University of Barcelona (UB), a Master in Cinema and Contemporary Audiovisual Culture at the Pompeu Fabra University, and another Master in Humanistic Psychotherapy at the Rogers Institute in Barcelona, my center of interest is in the intersection of metaphysics, technique, and phenomenology of images in the current digital context.
I like to work in a back and forth path between digital and analog, both in the genesis of the image and in the search for forms of reproduction and projection, and thus influence both the materiality and the missing event contained in the image.
Being influenced by artists such as Nathaniel Dorsky, Stan Brakhage, or José Val del Omar, I like to consider my work as an attempt at something like a “Digital Mysticism”, an experimental ontology that moves in parameters ranging from the metaphysics of Averroes (Ibn Rush) or Henri Bergson to the new theories of the so-called Speculative Realism.
Director: Marc Samper Vidal
Sound design: Dario Bellera / HoBo Barcelona
Website: https://www.marcsamper.com
