Las imágenes que siembran misterio

Cuando unx se acerca a las imágenes en movimiento de la cineasta peruana Andrea Franco, se arrima el espíritu a desplazamientos abismales. La permanencia de una imagen se vuelve mar para luego ser viento y convertirse en flujo humano. Como los ojos, que parecen estar estáticos, oscilan incesantemente creando la ilusión del movimiento cinematográfico. El registro de las imágenes no es otra cosa que una cartografía de su memoria, una forma amorosa de habitar el territorio una y otra vez de la misma manera con un andar renovado, más sabio quizá. La mirada de Andrea Franco nos conduce a una quietud inestable, a una permanente interrogación por lo que vemos para así descubrir la conexión con la tierra querida y todo lo que nace de ella. Sus imágenes son memoria y expectación de acontecimientos cíclicos, como las estaciones, como la siembra, como el cine.
En esta ocasión, presentaremos cuatro de sus trabajos audiovisuales, a saber, Notes on Connection I (2016), Notes on Connection II (2019), En Ancon (2012) y Amelia y Morena (2010). 
Geraldine Salles Kobilanski
————————————————————————————————————-
(English below)

The images that sow mystery

When one approaches the moving images of Andrea Franco, the spirit is brought to abysmal shifts. The permanence of an image becomes sea and then it becomes wind and human flow. Like the eyes, which seem to be static, they oscillate incessantly creating the illusion of cinematic movement. The registration of images is nothing but a cartography of their memory, a loving way of inhabiting the territory again and again in the same way with a renewed walk, perhaps wiser. Andrea Franco’s gaze leads us to an unstable stillness, to a permanent questioning of what we see in order to discover the connection with the beloved land and everything that is born from it. Her images are memory and expectation of cyclical events, like the seasons, like sowing, like cinema.
On this occasion, we will present four works of the peruvian filmmaker Andrea Franco: Notes on Connection I (2016), Notes on Connection II (2019), In Ancon (2012) and Amelia and Morena (2010).
Geraldine Salles Kobilanski

En Ancón (2012)
Andrea Franco (PER)
16mm transferred to HD
El Malecón, series of 30″ x 30″ photographs
27 min

Ancon is a Peruvian beach town near the country’s capital, Lima. What used to be a pre Incan fishing town has become a privileged beach resort after the Spanish colony. With an observational lens, En Ancon explores the space of memory to uncover the filmmaker’s childhood where she spent her summers.With distance in time and space, and with the desire to observe and re-examine a place from the past, comes a different gaze and an evolution of thought and awareness.

The separation provides more opportunity of seeing things as they are. With space and time comes clarity. The filmmaker is familiar to this place, but has now grown from being born into this mentality and this system. Through the nostalgic eyes of adulthood En Ancon sheds a light to expose the existing barriers of class segregation that pertain in Peru. It also investigates the process of realizing the system we are in, in order to break off from it, and the process of change as a path to liberation.

“The square-format full-body candid portraits depict individuals or groups of people paused on the boardwalk in the coastal Ancón district with the horizon line falling just below the center of the image. Franco explains that there are rigid boundary lines (visible and invisible) along the beach busy at work highlighting public versus private (space) and white versus indigenous. (…)
Franco complicates the relationship of these spaces by first acknowledging their existence and then editing together her observational footage documenting the stark inequalities in the use of space along the shore.” — From Notions of Line(s), by Molly Sullivan