Things Said Once

2015 — 2019

Performance


Fabricated books, balloon, film reels, table and chair, plants, prints and photographs, 35mm slides, 16mm film projector and slide projector


Things Said Once is an artist statement and a praise to cinema from the recognition of its history and our responsibility towards its permanence in the present. Written as a poem, the text is built around an understanding of cinema as experience in its spatial, temporal and communitarian or social dimensions. As a performance, Things Said Once is presented as a reading in an elaborated environment that includes a series of bodily actions and objects through which the text is revealed.



Read text in EnglishFrenchSpanishMandarinPersian ⎪ Swedish


«[...] Esperanza Collado’s insightful and generous essay ‘Things Said Once’, a rigorously constructed series of citations drawn in part from her research on paracinematic practices. One of the key figures that emerges here is Hollis Frampton who was the first figure to introduce us to the idea of the artist or filmmaker as ‘metahistorian’, revealing a means by which the history of cinema could be used to act upon itself thereby destabilising the apparent security of our current condition. [...]Esperanza’s assemblage mimics those strategies devised by Walter Benjamin for Arcades Project, resulting in a work which gains its meaning through the arrangement of its material.» (Daniel Fitzpatrick and Alice Butler in «Introduction», in Luminous Void: Experimental Film Society Documents, EFS Dublin, Ireland, 2017)


As a performance, Things Said Once has been presented in Taipei, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the UK, Uruguay and Iran.


Thanks to: Rafa Martínez del Pozo, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Isabel de Naverán, Maximilian Le Cain, Núria Gómez Gabriel, Toni D'Angela, Érik Bullot, Robert Smart, Pip Chodorov and New Media Society.
     
     
     
     
  Performance view photographs:
Duna Vallés (La KINO, Barcelona, 2016) and Tzuan Wu (Taipei Contemporary Art Center, 2020)