In this unusual edition of our festival, we reintroduce a long-time desired section: Xerme –our initiative to bring to the front the seminal artists of the Galician experimental cinema scene. Our goal is double: on the one hand, we aim to recover the early pieces of Galician experimental cinema; on the other, we wish to honor the creative roots that still lie below the new generations. This year, Xerme comes back to life with Antonio Segade and Antón Reixa, bringing to the audience a selection of works curated by the critic, writer, and lm director Jordi Costa (CCCB).

Xerme brings together a series of works that will be screened as single-channel projections (complemented with pictures of the video installations) along with two live video performances by the artists.

All the selected works, which form an eclectic mix of genres, intentions, and sensitivities, have, however, something in common: they are the result of a collaboration between Antonio Segade and Antón Reixa. For 36 years, both creators have worked together exploring a wide variety of mediums: traditional video creation, video installation, film/DVD, book/DVD, commercial television, cinema, and commercial advertisement among others.

Xerme invites us to observe and contrast the common elements of their unique collaborations. Over the years, Reixa’s name became more popular thanks to his work in the elds of literature and pop music. This serendipity, that blurred the two artists’ symbiosis putting Segade’s name in a secondary place, was reinforced by Segade’s natural tendency to keep a low profile.

Now, our aim is to put together the pieces of such a promiscuous audiovisual inventory.

The creators have voluntarily adopted the rubric FALAR POR NON CALAR (TALKING FOR TALKING’S SAKE) for this section. Given that the format they have explored the most and that feels most genuine to them is video poetry, they’ve always developed their art from the premise that the poetic word plays a secondary role in relation to the image. The images’ function is to illustrate the words, because, according to their credo, “1 word is worth 1000 images.” Only in their latest works (Michigan and Melancoholemia), the word/image relationship becomes more symbolic than a mere illustration. To achieve this, they have approached the works of classic painters of universal art, such as Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. With Xerme, they put to test their vehement affirmation: is it true that 1 word is worth 1000 images? Now it’s our turn to discover it.

Curated by Jordi Costa, this collage-like “fuzzy suite” was put together with fragments of the following pieces: