Video installation, 9' 06", sofa draped in a cloth

La Siesta is the result of an invitation by the Netherland Film Museum and the Joris Ivens Fondation in Amsterdam in 1995. This video installation uses black-and-white footage from several films by director Joris Ivens (1898-1989), dating from the 1930's through the 70s, juxtaposed with colour images made by Muntadas. There is audiovisual recording of a nap, a moment of intimacy, and a symbolic evocation of dreams and utopia. Beginning with the sentence "All works of art are always autobiographical," the introduction is a journey into memory, history, activity and war, and the silent image of a hand emphasizes La Siesta/The Nap/Dutje as a metaphor of pause, reflection and space between.

The label that introduces the video says "An art work is always autobiographical", and this sentence (according to Muntadas, an argument that would not have sustained in some way some years ago) defines the spirit of the work, that neither deals with Ivens nor is exactly a tribute, but combines fragments of some of his films in order to reflect on certain issues and attitudes that, as the organizers of the project seek, a today's multimedia artist can feel close to the concerns, commitment and various stages that characterize the profile of that great filmmaker. Thus, the common thread of the images is indeed a siesta, in the middle of which are inserted short fragments of the first filmography of Ivens - as moments dreamed or fleeting memories -, which have been selected from among his more experimental works and formally avant-garde; where, even when he begins to deal with the working world and its struggles or other political issues, there is a simultaneous formal concern for the image, the strength of the composition and the rhythm of the montage. And the gesture by which the rest time of the nap is represented is the arm of the sleeper, hanging from the side of an armchair, the fist closed, but not raised, taking on an unmistakable symbolic connotation. (In its presentation as installation, La siesta ... comes to reproduce a spatial arrangement analogous to that represented in the initial frame of the video, because this one is projected on a white wall and on an armchair located in front.) In this way, the subjective aspect and of aesthetic exploration that maintains the art of the media (as before the avant-garde film, documentary, experimental cinema, that appears in Ivens's youthful years) is put in relation with a critical vision and ethical alert to reality and its conflicts. And the denouement of the piece is, as it could be otherwise, the same of the restorative nap: the awakening and the return to the activity momentarily interrupted.

Eugeni Bonet

Muntadas: Monitoring of the Project (v2.0) (1999)