Performance view photographs: Tzuan Wu (Taipei Contemporary Art Center, 2020), Susana Ponce (CA2M, Madrid 2024)

Things Said Once 2015 — 2024 Performance and text Fabricated books, balloon, film reels, plants, prints and photographs, 35mm slides, 16mm film projector and slide projector Read text in English ⎪ French⎪ Spanish ⎪ Mandarin ⎪ Persian ⎪ Swedish Things Said Once exists as a comic too, with drawings by Paula Guerrero. As a performance, Things Said Once has been presented in Teheran, Madrid, Taipei, Mexico City, Oberhausen, Montevideo, Barcelona, Cuenca, Málaga, Brussels, Bristol, New York. 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. → Digital documentation (Spanish)

Things Said Once is an artistic statement and a tribute to film and cinema that acknowledges its history and our responsibility for its continuity in the present. Written as a poem, the text is built around the concept 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 a curated environment that includes a series of performative actions and objects through which the text unfolds. «[...] 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)