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Fantasía

Proyectos Ultravioleta presents:
Carlos Amorales & Joaquin Orellana
Guatemala City, Guatemala

FANTASIA is a project by Carlos Amorales (Mexico City) and Joaquin Orellana (Guatemala City), made up of two videos, being shown for the first time in Guatemala.

This project came to being following a research trip to Guatemala in 2012, by Carlos Amorales and Julian Lede, in which there was a chance encounter with Joaquin Orellana as they visited the Centro Cultural Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala’s National Theater).

“Orellana’s Fantasia” is a short film (co-authored with Julian Lede) that registers the shadows of a performance by Guatemalan contemporary music composer Joaquin Orellana, who created and used a set of musical instruments inspired in xylophones and marimbas after his studies at the Di Tella avant-garde music center, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by the end of the sixties.

After becoming interested in electronic music and working with tape loops Orellana returned to his country to discover that he had no more access to the technology and the knowledge that he required to create his music. To continue, Orellana built a set of instruments that are analogue models made to perform as if they where electronic instruments. Each instrument has to be performed by following a score written out of a set of symbols and notations that he invented to do so.

Fascinated by Orellana’s unusual take on electronic music, Carlos Amorales and musician Julian Léde commissioned him in 2012 to create his own version of the score for a segment of the classic animation film “Fantasia” by Walt Disney. The filmic registration of the shadows casted on a screen by the instrument’s forms, the notations and the musician became the animation that rounds Orellana’s version.

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a black and white video, with sound, on synchronised double screens, which was created by Amorales’ following his collaboration with Orellana. The process to realise this animation was excruciatingly detailed, as it required frame by frame work on top of Walt Disney’s original film of 1940. Specifically, he extracted each frame and reproduced it numerous times in a black and white photocopy machine, as to dilute the original image with each photocopy of the photocopy. Following, he manually ripped each photocopy in half, scanned each half-frame, and re-arranged it digitally in the post-production studio.

Other exhibitions by these artists at Proyectos Ultravioleta: