Kino B: Contemporary Cinema by Berlin-based Artists

16MM by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

(2011, 16mm installation on video, color, sound, 5:26)

16MM is a continuous single take, a long shot traveling with constant speed through the jungle, going deeper and deeper inside it, for the duration of the roll of film, feet by feet. 16MM is both an essay on cinema and on the forest and the crossings that occur in it. A film about time and the nature of the creative act. An exercise of penetration that is not without psychological connotations. A tactile look. A conceptual and physical work.

Due to a custom system built to shoot 16MM, the camera films and moves through a cable with only one motor that propels and connects both distances and movements: each meter of shot film corresponds exactly to a meter advanced through the woods, and the speed of this movement corresponds to the speed the film achieved inside the camera.

This structural analysis of the medium was made in the jungle because even today it is one of the ultimate depths and is from the impact felt entering the forest that the whole idea emerges. But this impact is not only physical or psychological: the Mata Atlântica rainforest in southwestern Brazilian is also, geopolitically, one of the densest places in the world. Since the time of the "discovery" to the "post"-colonial day of today, in the jungle happen a succession of conflicts: economic, ecological, geographic, human, scientific, historical, territorial, etc ... crossing each other, creating a network of relationships as complex as the geometry of the vines, branches and trunks, and so difficult to equilibrate as it is to penetrate its natural thickness.

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Barcelona, 1977) has had numerous solo shows including Phasmides, Mendes Wood, São Paulo; Cipó, Taioba, Yví, Casa França Brasil, Rio de Janeiro; and Duna económica / Maqueta sin calidad, Halfhouse, Barcelona. Suicide Narcissus is currently on view at the Renaissance Society, Chicago. Group shows include Out of the Blue, Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid; Tropicalia Negra, Museo Experimental el Eco, Mexico DF; The Imminence of Poetics, 30ª São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo; Ambiguações, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro; Pindorama Suit, Rongwrong, Amsterdam; and Forgotten Bar Project / Galerie im Riegerungsviertel, Berlin. He has received grants and prizes from MUSAC, Ciutat d'Olot, CoNCA, ABC Prize, Miquel Casablancas, José García Jiménez Foundation, and Akademie der Kunste. Besides his artistic practice, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané co-organizes the experimental school Universidade de Verão at Capacete, Rio de Janeiro.

Curated by Caroline Koebel for Aurora Picture Show         (Kino B program)