More info at DocumentaMadrid
Narcisa Hirsch is a key figure in the history of Argentine and Latin American experimental film. Narcisa Hirsch was born in Germany in 1928, though she has lived in Argentina since childhood. Her name has remained obscure for too long due to her double eccentricity: of being a woman and of making films far from major centers where the history of experimental film has mainly been made: The United States and Europe.
This double, uncentered condition did not, however, prevent her from keeping up with world movements in experimental and video art, and her work--simultaneously personal, domestic, mystical, and characteristically unique--maintained a relationship with the authoritative names and films (in many cases, without ever being able to see them) in video and experimental art, though always shying away from imitation and claiming cinema as a space for freedom.
“The freedom of working with very little money is the freedom from having to sell, it is the freedom of working at home and by hand, without big crews or sets. Nor any time constraints. One shot is taken per day, or one per year. Each one chooses their time and space. For that reason, and for everything else, experimental film is a subversive art, more so than documentary or political cinema. More subversive than intellectual or conceptual cinema. Which is why so few go into it, and even fewer stay”. Narcisa Hirsch
Hirsch began working in art as a painter and illustrator in the 1960s and quickly made the leap into the public sphere performing happenings in search of a new audience. Understanding cinema and creation as a collective process of work and thought, she built up a close-knit community around her film and artistic practice from the start of her career, a dispersed network of experimental artists and filmmakers who came together through the Unión de Cineastas de Paso Reducido (UNCIPAR) around the Goethe Institute and the Di Tella Institute, and which originally included names such as Marie Louise Alemann, Claudio Caldini, Jorge Honik, Juan José Mugni, Horacio Vallereggio and Juan Villola, who ended up being crucial to the formation of the independent and experimental scene in Argentina. A network and a powerful concept of the collective that continues to this day, when, at over ninety years of age, Hirsch holds weekly meetings (in-person before the pandemic, now via video-conferencing) with an extensive network of young filmmakers and experimental film buff whom she has taken under her wing.
This three-session retrospective brings together some of her most important films (pioneering in many ways, Narcisa's work also includes installations, graffiti, and performances) made since the 1970s, chosen in dialogue with the filmmaker herself as a way of presenting work that focuses on spiritual and existential issues, love, birth, death, eroticism and feminine power, taking the materiality of the body as its lynchpin. In Narcisa Hirsch's work, the domestic landscapes, interiors and exteriors, of Buenos Aires and Patagonia serve as an extension of an exploration that is simultaneously formal and personal: the body, the eternal, the interior, the exterior, that which moves, that which remains, the intimate and the collective. Cecilia Barrionuevo
