About Budellera. I recently read that film, as an operation, came out of a hysterical activity.

In other words, the difference from, for instance, a tableau vivant or a photograph involved making a system work, starting up a scene. A tableau vivant, by contrast, leaves the object presented in a state of fetish; still, lit and framed. Actually I think that in the work I am showing there is a degree of contagion between aspects of one activity and another so that sometimes this hysteria can turn the scene into a static still life and, conversely, on occasion a certain lighting, stillness and fragmentation of the scene can in one way or another trigger hysteria, however subtle it may be. I use some of these operations to make a subjective record of my surroundings. The record consists of tracking urban development work in this area by, as I say, triggering a system that is closer to a hallucinogenic, ecstatic vision linked with the place than a customary portrait. There is an attempt to infect the viewer of this local imaginary where the temporary items (pipes, cement blocks, diggers, branches, worms, boars, etc.) validate a certain chronological stage of the landscape. Firstly, there is a part of the piece that takes place at night. Light stimulates a mental space where icons are created and images are sweetened as on a set. A distance is imposed and the familiar is filtered to show it as anomalous. One can move forward along a kind of virtual tour, associating the elements that appear in it to fit in with an almost psychogeographical reading of the terrain. In this part I use a car as a means of approaching the place but also to influence its staging (making movements and sequences, lighting, producing sounds, etc.). Ritual structures this part of the video and catalyses a moment in the process in which I had opened up a path of sound and musical experimentation which I have included. It is precisely through a rhythmic sequence that the images appear, practically observing the logic of a video clip. Then secondly there is a daytime portrayal of the place that is the obverse of the previous part. The intention is to reveal everything that at night can have makeup applied and is adaptable. It removes all the props, there is no fog, there are no faders or stage lighting, there is no soundtrack, the sequences are journeys and the animals seem more domestic. There is still a bit of a hangover and some elements that had a totemic presence are identified as monuments of the night. The delirious itinerary becomes a stroll. Gerard Ortn Gerard Ortns artwork revolves around his garden, an intermediate zone between the close and orderly space of his home and the unknown forest. As a controlled seminatural space, his garden provides the artist with a powerful experimental device for researching and testing the world, while at the same time it is also a geographical and ontological limit that sets the bounds to this field of artistic experimentation and the knowledge that can be derived from its visual depiction. In Budellera, his project for the Sala dArt Jove, Ortn has moved the focus of his work to outside the boundaries of his garden in order to spend almost a year documenting the urban development of the area around his home in the la Font de la Bulledera neighbourhood in Vallvidrera, a town to the north west of Barcelona. The artist has

researched the neighbourhood and the possible origins of its name and has made an extensive sound, photo and film record of the place and the progress of work, which he has then used to create two video pieces that are shown on a double screen in the exhibition room. One of the videos has been shot during the day and the other at night, and together they form a binomial, a diptych that offers two complementary visions of the same location. The daytime shooting is constructed mainly from several rough and bumpy travelling shots, which among other things show half asphalted streets, materials and infrastructure used for the building work, houses, larvae, trees, wild boars and, briefly, the Budellera fountain which is the pivotal point of the project. The daytime video affords a brighter and nicer portrait of this environment, which stands in stark contrast to the record of the night. The latter proposes a darker and more hypnotic reading of this reality, in which some of the objects that looked pleasant in the morning shooting reappear with an anodyne and almost menacing appearance. In the night film we also see the artist, who appears as an enigmatic figure camouflaged in the darkness who occasionally illuminates the landscape that surrounds him, either using a precarious lighting device that he turns on and off manually, or alternatively by playing a drum kit which is connected to a sensor and activates red light sources. His fleeting appearance reinforces the mysterious and disturbing aspect that the whole film exudes. The auditory component is important in both pieces. Sometimes it consists of ambient noise recorded by the camera while on other occasions the sounds we hear have been recorded beforehand and have been added to a particular scene in the editing process. Some of the auditory components have been composed by the artist using the drum kit briefly glimpsed in one of the videos. Even though he is working in a new location, in Budellera Ortn brings together many of the elements that characterise his earlier work. The two video pieces in the project are part of a concept far removed from traditional documentary parameters. Far from providing an objective and neutral record of the reality it is proposed to document, Ortn builds a daring and experimental audiovisual work in which symbolic and poetic associations supplant the possibility of the customary evolving narrative. His approach to the context in which he works and to the landscape in general is not the outcome of town planning or sociological interests but rather results from an attraction to the form and aesthetic properties of the materials. It is perhaps for this reason that the record he makes of them does not establish a categorical distinction between the natural and the artificial, between the boars, worms and the branches of the trees and the concrete, the plastic pipes and cranes. All of these elements are recorded as parts of an integrated whole, of an ecosystem, using an aesthetic and a video style that includes elements of science fiction films, and which forces the depiction of the documented reality to present a strange and distorted image of it that refuses to be interpreted and recognised. Alexandra Laudo