Xisela Franco
Interior, exterior, durante [Interior, exterior, in-between]

“In fact, he is looking at nothing; he retains within himself his love and his fear; that is the Look”
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The film-maker Xisela Franco (Vigo, Spain, 1978) belongs to a new generation of creators who experience the metamorphoses of the cinema in a free, diverse and unprejudiced way, delving into the intersection between cinema and contemporary art, investigating and developing the conundrums arising from the spatial and conceptual limits of expository cinema. Female creators fully aware of the fundamental link between feminism and video art, who in the technological and digital find the conceptual framework from which to investigate and act, and whose thematic interests contemplate the rebirth of the body, identity and memory, among others, with a subjectivity developed under multiple approaches. Thus, Xisela Franco’s perspective evolves from personal experiences, in the case of the visceral Anima Urbis (2010) or Vía Láctea [Milky Way ] (2013) and in the work Interior, exterior, durante [Interior, exterior, in-between], which we now present (woven around the notion of motherhood) also with the need to intrude into the private world of other women: with contributions to more intimate stories and from the standpoint of social questioning, such as Aadat (2004) and Cruz Piñón (2015). A path of works articulated from experimental cinema, which give shape to the different scientific and expository productions and projects, such as the recent awareness-raising project Cinema e muller [Cinema and women] (Pontevedra Provincial Council).

In this, her first solo exhibition, Xisela Franco invites visitors to the museum to become cinema viewers, to contemplate time from its own temporality. Interior, exterior, durante [Interior, exterior, in-between] is a project that works with the handling of time to attain an expectant, sonorous geography, which she captures in that which is happening, in the convergence of recorded image and duration experienced. Franco filmed the work expressly for the exhibition room, adapting to its opening hours, conceptualising the very expository mechanism. Thus, the exhibition features a nine-hour screening in the form of a triptych, with static camera shots over a coastal landscape; the sublime and surrounding, symbolic and infinite power of the sea, an element that is present, either directly or indirectly, in many of her works. She combines images with sound, with the voices of a family which transfer the domestic atmosphere and codes to the room: contextualising the hours of the day, evaluating an emotional climate and showing the progress in language learning made by little Maia, her daughter, recorded over a three-year period. Voices which are the extension of individual narratives; of teaching and learning; renunciation and generosity. Image and sound are thus constructed in the same way, but presented in an apparent opposition, which will gradually be transformed, to finally form the viewer’s experience.

Particularly noteworthy in the work is the ease with which the artist transforms the common, from and in opposition to the everyday. Franco questions her surroundings and introduces memory to activate the confrontation with the present moment in time, with the entirely intellectual aim of interpreting it without hiding the emotional aspect that such an exercise entails. An intimate script, concocted on the basis of an archive of objects, sounds and images which, as occurs in Chantal Akerman’s film-guides, transform the screen into her own skin. In this case, tattooed with a perfect, incomprehensible, luminous nature, altered only in the three fragments which make up the composition. Thus, Xisela Franco’s triptych turns into a parapet, a veil, a pit, an embrace. Setting and mirror Each one of the images transmits a sort of enjoyment of the void, as well as of depth, banality and monotonous in the slowness of its unhurried rhythm, with long shots in which the duration underscores and constructs, defines, the process. The flow of time is broken up into a kind of triptych of snaps or canvasses, in an immediate relationship with the visual arts which, nonetheless, promptly distances itself in the marginal spaces, reserved for resources, trials or errors, evincing the distinction between technological reproduction and experience of what is real. The author constructs types of images reminiscent of a monitor on standby, suggesting against the backdrop of the pause a strategy of introspection in order to immerse us in that private and complex narration about upbringing. One might say that the artist presents a perfect image in order to experience a wonderful imperfection, in a sort of emotional pediment.

This constitutes an essential project in the quest undertaken by Xisela Franco to set herself on the sidelines of the creative and expository processes that accompany cinema and art, through an issue as complex as the treatment and representation of time. Framed within the reflections on her daughter’s birth, in the progression of her learning, this interval is the ideal one for surprising us in the fascination that our immediate surroundings arouse in us. An emotional, poetic journey through personal and creative interferences, which at the same time document the artist’s internal and external settings: manners of being in the world, of observing it, of documenting it and of interpreting it. Time, place and action in the conundrum of life.

Chus Martínez Domínguez