Juan Arturo García
Directing
Biography
In his work, Juan Arturo García explores accented ways of living, their biopolitical affordances, and tactics for their representation. His ongoing investigation delves into the correlations between the political, territorial, and linguistic implications of cosmopolitanism. Employing a medium-agnostic approach, the work strands along with evidence, fiction & forecast to explore a space between translation and the impossibility of translation, with a special interest in the ways in which languages are materially, bureaucratically, and metaphorically a defining condition of access; in other words, the political implications of hyper-, mis- , and un-translatability.
Known For
In livestock farming the blood of slaughtered cows becomes either a hidden component of products ranging from pharmaceuticals to soy substitutes, or it gets discarded, dried and burned for energy. Following this invisible trail of blood, the film investigates the architecture and tools that determine the value of a material once considered the substance of life.
Blood-related
Within a banana plantation and a botanic garden, a panel of botanic experts are challenged to discuss contemporary trends in gardening, scientific classification, and monocultural crops by an astute interviewer. The hidden politics of the experts’ positions are uncomfortably exposed and confronted with reality, as they render themselves suspicious of their own language.
The Inner Life of Exterior Plants
When an atomic clock lags for 1 second –an event that happens once every 30 million years– two characters start hearing strange sounds that no one else hears. Time is displaced and continually disputed for the protagonists, as they pass their days under the influence of a decades-old nuclear reactor, a relic of the Cold War holding nuclear waste with a millenary half-life, and the millions of years required for the formation of mountains, which are studied at the reactor, at the atomic level.
Time, displaced
Through speculative & historical fiction, the film re-enacts in an unstated present time, a clash between Illustrated science and the possibility of another science, that was not allowed to flourish. However obscure, the conflict is important because it outlines a haunting pattern of colonizing power in the history of Latin American science that spawns across disciplines and centuries.