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A Full Empty, 2018

A Full Empty, 2018

Serafín Álvarez turns to science fiction to present what is not human and begin a journey towards the unknown. He is fascinated by the moment when a protagonist leaves home and enters an unknown world, thus initiating a physical displacement that brings about an inner change, a metamorphosis. A journey from which you return transformed. A Full Empty focuses on the way in which this moment has been represented in science fiction cinema. Álvarez uses 3D video-game technology in real time, the camera showing a long, reverse tracking shot through a strange, misty landscape accompanied by music that heightens the sense of mystery. Trees, rocks, stones and streams are encountered alongside rusting drums, abandoned cars and other elements of an industrial past. Is it a post-catastrophe landscape? The result of a meteorite or a nuclear disaster? The vestiges of the road offer different possible narratives about which we can only speculate. A disturbing, contemplative journey with no end in sight.

As in other works, Álvarez makes use of multiple cinematographic, television, video game and literary references. ‘This work is based on two fictional texts: Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, and, especially, the novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, on which Tarkovsky based his film. Both texts are about a forbidden zone to which humans have restricted access and which develops its own ecology, and while making that video I found myself thinking about what the planet would be like when we are no longer here. (...) In Roadside Picnic, the scientists who study the forbidden zone explore it with great care, because it is full of deadly traps. They have developed hoverboots with a “route memoriser” system that, once they have finished an exploration journey into the zone, returns them back on their steps in an automated way to reduce danger, undoing on the way back the same route they did on the way out and therefore without falling into the traps already bypassed. The video is influenced by this automated journey of return having entering a strange place in search of something.’


Technical details

Original title:
A Full Empty
Registration number:
AJC.0003
Artist:
Álvarez, Serafín
Date created:
2018
Fonds:
MACBA Collection. Barcelona City Council long-term (in process of being incorporated)
Object type:
Audiovisual recording
Media:
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 9 min
Edition number:
Ed. 1/5
Credits:
MACBA Collection. Long-term loan of the Barcelona City Council. Work purchased by the Barcelona City Council through MACBA for the ‘Call for submissions: acquisition of pieces for the promotion of creators of contemporary art’
Copyright:
© Serafín Álvarez
It has accessibility resources:
No

The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.

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