Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona presents Gunvor Nelson’s ‘TIME BEING’ as part of their film programme “Filming the Bond” on the 22nd of February, exploring connections between mother and daughter. The screening is part of CCCB’s Xcéntric film programming series, which features different explorations of genres and subject matters, often seen through the expressions of experimental filmmakers. Curator for the screening is Carmela Tió Sesé.
Film programme:
Work distributed by Filmform
TIME BEING
Gunvor Nelson
1991, 00:06:00
About the programme:
The films in this session explore the bond between mothers and daughters as a choreography of gestures and gazes, where closeness and distance —physical, emotional or generational— become the stuff of cinema. In all of them, the filmmakers film their mothers at different moments in their lives, evoking the passing of time, the changing roles, the caregiving, traces of family stories and of everything that has not been said.
With an intimate yet self-reflective gaze, this relationship is set in different scenes that act as spaces of memory, affection or mourning. In Aparición, pétalo y lengua, Valentina Alvarado recounts, in fragmentary manner, a dream of her mother, Mila. The film performance, on a double screen and with live sound, is constructed of memories, colours, gestures and words that describe a bond marked by physical distance and by a landscape that the artist inhabits in diaspora. The sensuous images also run through Kopfüber im Geäst, filmed as a personal diary by Ute Aurand, who portrays the years leading up to the death of her parents. The passing of time is apparent in everyday scenes, family photographs, shared spaces and objects —a room, a cupboard, flowers in the garden— in an exercise in acceptance and memory. Taking My Skin, by Sarah Pucill, proposes a visual and affective dialogue between the filmmaker and her mother, where filming becomes a symbolic process of separation and reconciliation, in which time seems to stop. Meanwhile, in Time Being Gunvor Nelson faces the difficult moment of saying goodbye to a mother. Finally, the act of filming also becomes a form of mourning and invocation in Mourning Garden Blackbird, in which Anna Thew films her mother’s garden after the latter’s death. In all of them, the complexity of this bond is revealed through cinema, as a means to come together.
Aparición, pétalo y lengua, Valentina Alvarado Matos, 2024, double 16mm screening, 20 min, live performance; Kopfüber im Geäst, Ute Aurand, 2009, 16 mm, 15 min; Taking My Skin, Sarah Pucill, 2006, 35 min; Time Being, Gunvor Nelson, 1991, 16 mm converted to digital, 6 min; Mourning Garden Blackbird, Anna Thew, 1984, 16 mm, 8 min.
Aparición, pétalo y lengua, courtesy Valentina Alvarado Matos. Kopfüber im Geäst, from Arsenal. Taking My Skin, from Lux. Time Being, from Filmform. Mourning Garden Blackbird, from Lightcone.