The Venezuelan artist’s epistolary films, screened at last year’s Lofoten International Art Festival, capture poetic potential in the evolving technologies of communication
Four words are inscribed on the opening shot of Valentina Alvarado Matos’s Film Letters I (2020): “From: Valentina. To: Nazli.” Across the next four epistolary films (each four minutes long), the artist narrates her lonely, wandering, labyrinthine thoughts, superimposed onto the grainy textures of Super 8 film. In her voiceover she repeats and reworks the same passages or phrases, at times with variations as if they were drafts. The gentle, calming tone of her storytelling is unbalanced to subtle effect: here and there, her breaths fall awkwardly, or she’ll mismatch and overlap the synchronisation of text and image.
The Super-8 shots – flickering and running in and out of regular frame rates, soaked in the decaying analogue film’s oldness – feel elegiac, like a message already sent. At times, the world beyond the confines of sender to receiver creeps in: in one shot, an atlas on thin paper is set alight, absurdly burning the majority of South America (Venezuelan Matos’s home continent) while the rest curls slowly. Though mostly Matos plays on the edge of clarity, evoking rather than informing us of anything. We never hear from Nazli, though as we listen to the messages intended for him, we begin to feel that we might know him.
Matos’s ‘letters’ screened as part of last year’s edition of the biennial Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) in the Norwegian archipelago, in its Kinobox programme, constituting two photobooth-style ‘micocinemas’ (initiated by the artists Ruth Aitken and Sarah Schipschack). Matos’s first two chapters played in a booth stationed within a shipping terminal in Svolvær, the 2024 edition’s host island, and the following two chapters concurrently in a terminal in neighbouring island Tromsø. Seafaring viewers could ride a commercial liner between the two. The space was evocative: a photobooth, like those used for preparing travel documentation; a seated, curtained chamber, as if stepping in for a private phone call; a ship standing by, waiting to complete your journey.
The movement of information, whether through telegram, postal box or DM, forms the basis of LIAF’s 2024 edition, overseen by curator Kjersti Solbakken. The biennial’s title, SPARKS, was inspired by the Lofoten Line, the 170 kilometres of sea cables and landlines that comprised Norway’s first telegraph line outside the main telenetwork. Completed in October 1861, the line connected the archipelago’s nine fishing communities so that they might inform one another in morse of fishing populations and warn of oncoming weather. Archival photographs presented as part of the biennial portray a human character to the line: women test radio transistors and men arrange cablework down by the moss-spotted rocky cliffs. Some workers would camouflage messages within the many kilometres of wiring, for a stranger to one day discover.
In a time of uniquely surveilled yet frictionless communication – where a given message may at once be instant and uninterrupted, while also encrypted or overseen by strangers – both LIAF and Matos wonder how we might reenliven our methods of nonphysical communication: beyond information and the binaries of call and response.
Screening dates:
Art Lovers Movie Club: Valentina Alvarado Matos, Film Letters I-IV, 2020, Super 8, digital, 16 min
27 February–17 March 2025
© Courtesy the artist
About the artist:
Valentina Alvarado Matos (Maracaibo, b. 1986) is an artist based in Barcelona. Her practice focuses on collage; understanding it as a vessel that contains many forms, such as paper film and ceramics. Through a reflection on the image and its materiality, she brings up issues related to diasporic identities, landscape, and language. Her work has been exhibited internationally and shown at film festivals worldwide. She has been an artist in residence at La Escocesa, Cultura Resident – Castellón, The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, Matadero Madrid and Hangar, Barcelona.
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