Carlos Vásquez Méndez

A life marked by wandering. A character that leaves no traces or maps to trace. The file does not give an account of him. His works had no scripts and only existed in the fugacity of the moment. Jorge Bonino was an unclassifiable artist. He triumphed in all of Europe without a translator, he only used an invented language that everyone understood. An imaginary friend mapped the traces his body left in space through stories about a possible life.

The mourning for a father and the absences, intertwined with what remains. Letters, written by birds that used to visit the filmmaker when she was a child, now reveal secrets to her son, whom she watches grow up.

Documentary about the horrors of the Chilean 80's dictatorship from the perspective of a son who has lost his fathers and goes into the quest of finding out more about them

In the countryside, in a hiatus of pandemic years, a child talks with her mother about how subjective our perception of time is, about the human attempts to represent the elusive shape of time and to understand its unmeasurable force. Year Zero is a film about the concept of time in different strata: one day, one year, one lifetime, and the massive cosmic timeline, where all the human time scale seems insignificant.

[PEWEN] ARAUCARIA shows the journey of a young poet after a long grief and loss to the ancestral land of the Pewenche people, in southern Chile. This diptych film reveals in one side as the poet establishes a relationship with the landscape marked by the wounds of the spanish colonization, marginalization by the state and abandonment that the indigenous peoples are subjected in Chile, on the other side, the film let us to glimpse a delicate and profound dialogue with this apparently strange world through the poet’s encounter with images of two Pewenche brothers and their relationship with the trees on which they base their livelihood.

In September 1973, 19 paper mill workers were imprisoned and taken to the Laja police station. Six years later, their bodies were found in Yumbel’s cemetery. After almost 40 years, one of the policemen involved broke the pact of silence they had made the night of the killing, revealing the participation of the Paper Manufacturing Company (CMPC) in the murder. Today, the case is still open and awaiting sentence.

mtDNA 1Ce hg is a landscape study, shot in northern Iceland at 16mm, approximately 400 feet long. This piece shows an environment stripped of the human figure, evoked only by its vestiges, apparently abandoned in the solitude of a barren terrain and an inclement climate. The title of the piece appeals an archaic link between who looks and the environment that crosses with a certain strangeness in capturing a small fragment of the history of the crossroads.

Western Winds/Eastern Winds is an experimental documentary film work about the roads passing through a small andean border town and the ways that connect it with history, modernity and the territory, also with those passages less visible, marginals and forgotten, that evoke past migrations in the west and the east side of this imaginary border.

This film essay brings together the particular and the universal in a conversation with a landscape framed by a window from a single vantage point. It draws from the intimate, the historical, the political, and the aesthetic to uncover the complex processes that have shaped the landscape over time, while simultaneously deconstructing the gaze that rests upon it.

A multiple projection work from Valentina Alvarado Matos & Carlos Vásquez Méndez.

An echo is produced when a wave is reflected on a surface and returns to the emitter. This film performance works on the idea of an echo, through the transmission, repetition and synchronisation of images and sounds, creating a system of reverberations that transform the space into a hall of mirrors.

If the heart is the muscle that never rests, the hands are not better off as the body’s laborers. They touch, hold, pick, and create, they bring things into existence. This film explores the relationship between art and labor in the most tactile of enterprises. Matter is present both in front of and inside the camera. In front we have ceramics, collectively mixed, molded, and shaped. Inside we have film (celluloid) collecting the light that comes from the world around ARROJALATIERRA. A film about making things that leave a trace in space and time. (Lucía Salas)

La Troya (in Chile) is the place where horses are exercised by going around in circles tied to a stake. I film this action taking into account the zoetropes mechanism, the study of animal locomotion carried out by the American zoopraxographer Edward Muybridge. and the film BERLIN HORSE by Malcolm Le Grice, and I try to disarticulate the movement of the horse in parts, first in "jump cuts" to then arrive at the minimum unit of cinema: the individual frames where the illusion of filmic movement is revealed.

Legerdemain is a piece commissioned by the CCCB (Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture) to be included in a program about film & music aimed at both adults and children. This short film piece is made up of sound essays produced by the fingers of one hand touching surfaces, pressing buttons and activating everyday artifacts that are undergoing a process of obsolescence, following a time cycle of 56 beats per minute.

The territorial conflict pacification between first nations and the post-colonial states begins with occupied lands restitution. In MENSOR appear the first lands returned to the Pewenche by the Chilean State. Through this film different measurement strategies are established both spatial and temporal correspondences in the search for equivalences between distance and focal length and between time and frames per second of a film strip.