Winter’s End /OVNI 2020
WINTER'S END is a reading of the OVNI Archives that weaves together testimonies of the present and the recent past, as well as intuitions of that which exists outside of time. A videographic journey through the OVNI Archives that retrieves some of the most emblematic pieces from previous editions, incorporates new works, and brings to light videos that have never been shown. It is also a journey through the work of Toni Serra- Abu Ali, encompassing works that he made under his own name, others under a pseudonym, and some anonymously, rewriting archival images. A showcase of the collective, rhizomatic work of the OVNI community over the years in four sessions on the sleep and wakefulness of our days, on being adrift in times of maximum volatility, and on memory, beyond illusion.
WINTER'S END is held in memory of Toni Serra-Abu Ali, who met with death on 21 November 2019. Co-founder of OVNI and author of an important and extensive video oeuvre, the OVNI 2020 programme is guided by some of his works.
Path of Return / OVNI 2018
visions, silence, darkness
And so this OVNI of fog takes us on a journey through the middle world, the experience of physical death and of the deaths of the ego.
The Center as the Border. Zones of Being and not Being [ migra and coloniality ] / OVNI 2016
The border has a tendency to spread: it explodes into outsourcing to third countries, and implodes as domestic borders, control devices, detentions and disappearances...; in other words, it tends to occupy the entire system, becoming centre. In the shadows of the border-as-system, where control is out of control, the prototype of a totalitarian society is assembled.
Observatory Archives: a tool / OVNI 2015
OVNI opens up public access to the Intranet of the Observatory Archives, founded in 1993. To launch this new phase, we will screen a programme of videos that establish the two poles of this project, which span from social critique at one end, to personal exploration at the other. Concerning Violence by Göran Hugo Olsson with texts by Frantz Fanon, Le Grand Jihad by Vincent Moon, a ritual around memory, and Le Jour a Vaincu la nuit, by Jean-Gabriel Périot, around dreams.
In Limbo: falling and flying / OVNI 2014
Limbo (Del Lat. Limbus): world between the living and the dead / storage space where de deleted archives are sent / a tale by Aldous Huxley.
Oblivion / OVNI 2012
This program in the form of an essay aims to shed light on some of the more disturbing aspects of contemporary life. Specifically, it looks at experiences involving conflict with power and at the imminent arrival of an even greater confrontation. A clash that exceeds the political realm and expands towards the notion of civilisation itself, and that seems to emanate from a source within the inner life of human beings.
We convey this vision through a programme with a dual core: La Commune by Peter Watkins, and The Mahabharata by Peter Brook, which we have contextualised with a series of documentaries and other documents that show contemporary expressions of the central theme.
Dis_Reality / OVNI 2011
"You are asleep, and your vision is a dream; all you see is an illusion.”
Mahmud Shabistari, The Secret Garden. Persia, 18th century.
OVNI disReality aims to reflect upon different phenomena of the critique of reality, their repercussions and the horizons that they illuminate, or recall. Extremely heterogeneous traditions and forms of experience radically question not only the concept of reality, but the very experience of the real.
Rhizomes: liberated spaces / OVNI 2009
OVNI Rhizomes lays bare the subterranean, rhizomatic points of contact between worlds and experiences that seem very different from each other. The remembered image is that of a rhizome (1), or rhizomes, it doesn't matter which because it is both at once, the singular and plural do not affect it. We screen videos like visions that connect and interrelate these states and realities, producing rhizome in space, but also in time, given that the first two principles of the rhizome are connection and heterogeneity: any of its points can and must be connected to anything else. This is not the case with trees and roots, which always fix a point, a particular order.
Exodus: The Margins of the Empire / OVNI 2008
"Open your eyes and look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living? (...) So we gonna walk, alright, through the roads of creation. We're the generation (Tell my why) trod through great tribulation". Exodus, Bob Marley
The videos screened at OVNI 2008 will offer an initial reflection on the “marginal” and the desire to cross margins, on forms of personal or collective exodus – whether physical or as a state of mind. They include perspectives on different forms of marginalization and exploitation which lie directly under the oppressive vertical force of power, such as workers in Chinese export factories or clandestine Palestinian day workers in Israel. And perspectives on armed conflict zones that go beyond the “propaganda-counter propaganda” dialectic: in South America, Chechnya, Lebanon, Iraq, Darfur, Afghanistan...
The Colonial Dream _ Autonomous Zones / OVNI 2006
A program of videos, independent documentaries and media archaeology dealing with colonialism and its mutations in the global age.
Colonialism and Eurocentrism are often discussed as though they were things of the past, fortunately overcome. But in life under globalisation, the reality seems to be just the opposite: the occupation and destruction of other worlds and cultures, systematic exploitation of their resources... and also aggressions at the local level, real-estate violence, colonial tourism, migra. Autonomy and no-zones: other ways of perceiving and creating community-based external realities and subjective inner ones. Autonomous ways of living and thinking, zones without limits, no-zones.
Resistances / OVNI 2005
The word resistance is starting to gain currency in places and cultures all over the world, joining those that have never stopped practicing it. Resistance implies negation, the blocking of a process or power, but it also contains an affirmation: that there are other ways of doing, thinking, living. Minorities and majorities marginalized in their own land practice it in various active and passive ways. Today, this practice is bringing together very diverse cultures and peoples, some totally unconnected, that are starting to become aware of each other, to talk of each other amongst themselves in this struggle.
In the 18th Century, the andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi wrote: " freedom unites us, unity frees us ", a statement that can me read on many levels, one which could be: Freedom unites us as free women, men and communities, and this unity frees us.
POST 09-11 / OVNI 2003
The screenings for this edition will be based on a selection from the 150 audiovisual documents that have been added to the Observatory Archives over the last 18 months. Together, this material reflects some of the most serious issues of our time, using different media and languages such as video art, independent documentary, media archaeology....to reflect the process of Globalisation and the Resistance it generates.
Presentation of the Observatory Archives / OVNI 2002
OVNI has permanently acquired the rights for the public consultation in the archive of some 420 works. These archives have an intentional and thematic character: to enable a critique of contemporary culture and society based precisely on the language that most characterizes it, using various strategies: video art, independent documentary, archeology of the mass media.
The Archives cover a huge range of works that are very different from one another, but share a commitment to freedom of expression and reflect on our individual and collective fears and pleasures. Together, they offer a multifaceted view, thousands of tiny eyes that probe and explore our world and announce other possible worlds. It is a discourse that above all values heterogeneity, plurality, contradiction and subjectivity, an antidote to the cloning and repetition of the current corporate mass media.
COMMUNITIES/ OVNI 2000
OVNI 2000 brings toughener a series of works which we hope may serve as a plural and multifaceted reflection on the notion of COMMUNITY, understood not as ideal, a closed and defined paradigm, but as a reality: spaces for social, anthropological, cultural and emotional relationships where we already find ourselves, irrespective of the acceptance, participation or conflict we develop within tem.
GLOBALIZATION / OVNI 1999
Memory / Collective fiction _ Dreams / Personal Memories _ Standards and archetypes and individual irreducibility _ Media paranoia and stories of schizophrenia _ Social passions and love stories _ The "American dream" / The "European dream" _ Temporary Autonomous Zones and Other Worlds.
IDENTITY vs MEDIA / 4th Independent Vídeo Show & Interactive Phenomena / OVNI 1997
Each of the programs that make up the 4MVI & FIN works as a route that aims to transport the viewer's state of mind and interest through a series of mental and emotional landscapes, in the manner of rites or trips, where each part of the route affects and alters the other. In this way, each program goes through fundamentally different works, following a flow that does not exclude contradiction or paradox, that reads meaning above concrete meanings.
Identity _ Noche Oscura del Alma _ William Burroughs _ Steven Reinke _ Joe Gibbons _ La Société du Spectacle _ Guy Debord _ Rick Prelinger Archives.
MEDIA DIGEST / 3rd MVI - Independent Vídeo Show / La 12 Visual / OVNI
In the 3rd MVI, this approach has led us to focus on two key issues that often intersect: Identity and Mass Media. An idea of identity not only influenced by a conceptual relationship with others and with the media, but also by inner experience – that non-transferable aspect of our individual journey – in a shifting context in which the real expands to embrace the media and the lived experience of everyday technology.
THE RAINBOW IS YOURS _ DEMONTAGE encore. _ KABELKUNST _ FLOPPY FOREVER _ ZONA ABIERTA.
La 12 Visual / Second Independent Video Show
Vídeo art. Independent Documentary.
La 12 Visual / First Independent Video Show