Trinomials of the Form

BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

• 21st April 2026 – 7:00 pm
  Centre d'Art Santa Mònica - Barcelona 

  Trinomials of Form, proposes a dialogue between two historical pieces from the Archive 94-20 and a contemporary short piece produced by the Observatory. This triple relationship functions as a node of recontextualization and reconsideration: it seeks to recover meanings preserved in one of the project’s archives, bring them into play from the present and open up new interpretations, while also stimulating the Observatory’s current production and reinforcing its dimension as an authorial project.

  

  There are images that are not past because they have not yet finished happening. They return, are reprinted, reappear in different tones, yet with the same open wound. The archive does not sleep: it looks straight at us and compels us to hold its gaze. In that contrast, the origin of a world we still inhabit becomes visible.

  The images do not narrate a closed event: they point to a persistence. Gestures, faces, words, territories observed and defined from the outside. The border is not a line: it is a constant operation, a way of organizing space, bodies, and belonging. What seems to be past does not return as a citation, but as a structure.

  When accumulation reaches its limit, discourse is exhausted. The image stops explaining and begins to weigh. Meaning does not move forward: it pauses, suspended.

  Then sound appears. Not to answer, but to open. Music does not contradict the conflict: it crosses through it from another place. Listening opens a crack in the order. There, for an instant, we cease to be a territory of control and become a sensitive surfac

  Between the harshness of contrast and the fragility of gesture, this session proposes a silent passage.

  From the force that imposes to the experience that resists.

  Not to close the wound, but to inhabit it.

  To allow something to persist where language can no longer reach and where the present barely dares to beat from within.

  The Devil, 8 min, Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2012, France.
  "You don’t know what we are"

  Natives, 25 min, Jesse Lerner, Scott Sterling,1991, U.S.
  The United States has long maintained its reputation as a paradise for immigrants; however, there has also been a longstanding tradition of American “nativism” seeking to exclude immigrants. In the current decade, a renewed wave of anti-immigrant sentiment has been observed. This film examines the discourse of nativism at the beginning of the 1990s, particularly in relation to the U.S.–Mexico border as a site that offers the opportunity to observe many of these issues.

  Clara Peya, (Live improvisation for the project The Black Anti-Sun)  7 min, Vincent Moon, 2024, Barcelona.
  A sensitive hole in time, like a rabbit hole in Alice’s world, runs across the black and white keys and along the lines of tattoos. A tear in the transparencies of modernist architecture, its blue stained glass and floral columns, like an urban utopia turned inside out, calling for a finally liberated use.