Audiovisual essay on time painting, shaking up historical abstraction based on Equipo 57's original film Film experiencia n.º 1. Base teórica: interactividad del espacio plástico from 1957.

"Recognition is not enough, you have to believe in colours, you have to believe in hallucinations, you have to believe in ghosts". (Equipo Moral)

This video is part of the project Equipo Moral, founded in Salamanca, which Chema Alonso and Carlos TMori have been developing since 1991. Its premise, synthesised from the texts of Emil Cioran, is "the error of all those who have embraced decadence consists in the fact that instead of encouraging it, they fight it: because as it advances, it exhausts itself, making it possible for new forms to emerge". Equipo Moral's working method is based on "recycling and decontextualisation to develop new perceptions, where personal speculation confronts canonical, closed and mystified ideas". By working with other people's material, updating it as a tribute, they "develop a meta-referential territory, which in itself contains the initial story, but whose new form expands the senses and sensibilities of the original". This abstraction of abstraction channels affective ideas without the need to create a story, expanding and displacing the audiovisual language.

In this way they propose an essay on audiovisual noise by freely distorting Equipo 57's film work: Film experiencia n.º 1. Base teórica: interactividad del espacio plástico, November 1957. Equipo 57 was a group of artists who, between 1957 and 1962, practised a type of chromatic abstraction – based on the Interactivity of Plastic Space – and initially comprised Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003), Luis Aguilera (1924-2011), Agustín Ibarrola (1930), Ángel Duarte (1930-2007), José Duarte (1928-2017) and Juan Serrano (1929). Through this piece they pay homage to an entire Spanish generation of 20th century abstract artists by re-reading this unique and historical piece in the form of a choral portrait - moving through different types and layers of digital noise – without getting lost in comfortable eulogies.

By means of the concealment, they modify the representation established by Equipo 57 – from the "interactivity of the plastic space" to "glitch appropriationism" – , the genre – instead of a time lapse animation, a dynamic sequence of decompositions close to viying – and the articulating technology – digital video instead of chemical film – , providing emotion by giving it a context through a sound that explores different registers. Pictorial abstractions that successively degrade and reintegrate as if pulsating through a spiral of events, from the outside to the centre, dispersing the chemical film into digital error. Intensifying their deterioration, they generate new chromatic forms that progressively fall apart.

Manuel Villamediana Bayón