#88

Through this section, monthly, we invite agents of the artistic system to share a selection of images related to their practice or current interests. Images are published daily in the header of our website and shared through our Instagram profile. At the end of the month, the complete selection of images is published together with a text that contextualizes them. Here is the selection of December 2022.

Making films could easily be argued to be the most quixotic of all the arts. It demands the same creative exertion as literature; composition skills that rival those of music-making; and an ability to capture or make an abstraction of reality not unlike that of painting. To top it all, unlike painters, composers or writers, even if filmmakers somehow manage to develop all these qualities, they still can’t make films by themselves: they need a motley crew of accomplices that includes technicians; investors; wizards of logistics; assistants; drivers and cheerleaders, all of them acting in concert to bring about something that no one can guarantee that will come out as it is supposed to.

In exchange for these inordinate demands, cinema offers a most uncommon reward: it is perhaps the only form of art that gathers the powers of all the others in one place. It has the evocative power of music; the possibility of creating alternate worlds of literature; the visual power of painting; and the therapeutic self-exploration capabilities—both for participants and for the viewers—of theater. Furthermore, cinema might be the only form of art that insulates the viewer completely; it disconnects him or her from their personal reality and plunges them with all their senses into the parallel reality the movie proposes. That potential to propose parallel worlds that become real was one of our motivations in doing the fauxtograms.

Fauxtograms were never about deception. We were not interested in tricking people into believing that our movies were real. Instead, we wanted people to know the films were fictitious, but that they contained a reality that could end up prevailing and earning a life of its own.

On Instagram, which is how most people first run into them, fauxtograms appear to be merely photographs with subtitles. Something so inane, that there are now apps that do it automatically. But fauxtograms are a more complex play on reality: in addition to the photograph with the subtitle we do a complete data sheet of the movie (name, year, country, director) and each fauxtogram has a backstory that may be the plot of the film or maybe an outlandish production anecdote, a personal story of the director, the actors, or the technicians, or a recount of an unexpected reaction that took place when the movie first met its audience.

With all this we have gradually compiled an encyclopedia of fictitious cinema that has stood its ground in the real world. Film criticism journals published reviews of our fake movies (exhibit 1, 2), people from the world of theater, film and music recorded video reviews discussing them (1, 2) and Mexico City’s Centro de la Imagen invited us to do a screening of the series, set to a live concert of the original soundtrack of one of the fake movies.

To do the fauxtograms, we imposed ourselves these parameters:

1. A cinema from every region in the world.
2. A cinema with equal representation of women and men. We sought to create the world we would like to live in: one where more women have access to show their creations.
3. Using the rest of the elements to tell what the subtitle and the image didn’t tell: the title, the name of the directors, the year, would subtly or conspicuously contribute meaning and complement the narrative.
4. Taking a step back from meme culture or psychotherapeutic pretense. We sought to distance the project from short-lived, disposable narratives and overstatements that leave nothing to the viewer. We wanted to release the semiotic power of an image with a scrutable phrase to unravel in the mind of the spectator; almost in the tradition of Lao-Tzu’s axioms: remarks anchored in an unconcluded chain that, as a result of the narrative insufficiency, propel the reader to seek a point of clarity within the vastness of their own imagination.
5. We also sought to avoid making the fauxtograms a personal journal. We believe that meaning is a phenomenon in the mind of the viewer; we didn’t want to exert an excessive influence in each person’s recreation. Maybe as a result of being four-hand works, they were never a personal matter. At one point or another one of us would inevitably slip and the other would contain or, in an attempt to understand would ask question that the other, by refraining to answer, would abandon. No prescriptions, no personal journals.

As in everything: the concept must come before the first step. The fauxtograms were guided by all the above, but mostly by an opposition to two Western notions we believe have interfered with the personal enjoyment of art: the notion of Truth, and the notion of the Artist as an individual genius. As we make progress in learning about the mind, neuroscience is discovering that reality is actually a consensus of sorts, not a static entity. The History of media made us realize that reality is rather accessible and subject to manipulation; science, that it is provisional. We believe, following an idea put in writing by Bakhtin, that any utterance is a link in a long chain of utterances, owing its existence to the preceding one: that no idea is original or proprietary, but rather a personal revision forever in debt to a chain of factors that propitiated it: there can be no Richard Prince without Duchamp.

With these precepts we sought to build fictions that would be undistinguishable from realities. Realities that are neither right, nor wrong, nor unique, a feat or an embarrassment, they are only what their creative possibilities allow them to be. Fictions that are as real as reality is fictional.