A singular contribution

The an­ar­chic, im­per­ti­nent, en­thu­si­as­tic and sur­pris­ing work of Al­bert Serra will be com­ing to the Bi­en­nale fes­ti­val in Venice in the first week of May, a month ear­lier than usual. The film­maker from Bany­oles, con­sid­ered in re­cent years a vi­sion­ary in his treat­ment of the image, will rep­re­sent Cat­alo­nia at the event under the spon­sor­ship of the In­sti­tut Ramon Llull.

The Cata­lan pavil­ion at the event - this is the fourth year - has never gen­er­ated so much ex­pec­ta­tion, which has grown still since Serra's pro­posal was pre­sented in Lon­don and Barcelona last month. What Serra has cre­ated for the pavil­ion is a se­ries of short film clips that to­gether make up a whop­ping five hours of film. In case there are doubts about the level of ex­pec­ta­tion sur­round­ing the film, the head of cin­ema at the Tate Mod­ern, An­drea Lis­soni, pre­dicts that Serra will be one of the stars of the Venice fes­ti­val this year.

Serra will take with him to Venice, Sin­gu­lar­ity, a free-form ex­er­cise in cin­ema he has cre­ated under the cu­ra­tion of Chus Martínez. The work fo­cuses on the age of tech­nol­ogy: “The idea dom­i­nat­ing Sin­gu­lar­ity is the loss of the body's cen­tral­ity: emo­tions, spir­i­tu­al­ity...they are now de­posited in de­vices,” says Serra about the film. Ac­cord­ing to the di­rec­tor, his work will be “strange and as­phyx­i­at­ing” be­cause of the dif­fi­culty of dis­tin­guish­ing be­tween what is real and what is ar­ti­fi­cial.

Be­yond this, try­ing to pin down the plot of his Venice pro­ject would be a waste of time, or worse, to con­fuse the pro­ject with the tropes of con­ven­tional film that he hates so much: “It won't be about any­thing and will be about every­thing,” says Martínez, who has played a key role in pro­duc­ing a work likely to have such a “Baroque ef­fect”, ac­cord­ing to Serra.

The pro­ject will be shown on five screens in the dark­ened pavil­ion. For Martínez, the im­por­tant thing is not what the au­dio­vi­sual in­stal­la­tion shows, but rather what it pro­poses: a vi­sion­ary re­flec­tion of an age of rad­i­cal change on the thresh­old of a new world, “that will prob­a­bly be in­stalled within a decade.”

The cu­ra­tor also points to the am­bi­tious na­ture of the pro­ject: “We want to take to Venice a way of mak­ing cul­ture that will carry thought a lit­tle fur­ther for­ward,” she says. In fact, Serra and Martínez have been pol­ish­ing the ex­per­i­men­tal pro­ject for a good part of a year.

The clips, filmed with some 15 non-pro­fes­sional ac­tors, as is Serra's cus­tom, were shot in Lleida and Ire­land, with a mine and a brothel the set­tings for what hap­pens, or does not hap­pen, ac­cord­ing to the cu­ra­tor. Added to this is a process of edit­ing with­out plan­ning and to­tally im­pro­vised that re­lies on the di­rec­tor's raw tal­ent.

With the Venice fes­ti­val, Serra will have par­tic­i­pated in the two most im­por­tant an­nual events of the art world. Three years ago, Serra's was in­cluded in the Doc­u­menta fes­ti­val in Kas­sel. Few ques­tion the pres­ence of Serra's work in events that go be­yond the world of cin­ema. Though their work is dis­tinct, Serra often in­vokes the name of Andy Warhol, and al­ways gives credit to the in­flu­ence of sur­re­al­ism.

The Cata­lan pavil­ion –not of­fi­cial– will be part of the Eventi Col­lat­er­ali, at a cost of half a mil­lion euros. Yet, it fits well with the –of­fi­cial– Span­ish pavil­ion, fo­cus­ing on Dalí's nour­ish­ment of today's artists. The pavil­ion is cu­rated by Martí Manen, from Barcelona, and one artist is the Cata­lan, Francesc Ruiz.

Sin­gu­lar­ity opens in Venice on May 6, where it will spend the whole sum­mer and part of au­tumn. In De­cem­ber, it will go on dis­play in La Vir­reina Cen­tre de la Imatge in Barcelona.