“Scene 1. Outdoor, daylight. High-angle shot,” she orders mentally.   The impossibly blue spotless sky of the tropic is spattered by a flock of birds, reminding the woman that time still goes by. She absents herself from the world while imagining, and she has been fantasizing for some time now about a curious camera | … |

Many stories can be read within the history of comics. The mere mention of the term brings to mind the genre’s battle to legitimize itself as an important artistic and cultural form. However you look at it, the history of comics is also that of its struggle against power, against the constituted forms of what can and cannot be said (and shown). Most likely, no other of fine art has been so controlled, censored, and despised –even within the art world– as the form of art that Will Eisner preferred to call «sequential.»

  At the age of sixteen, Colonel Spencer’s daughter desired only one thing: to pull bunnies out of a hat. That’s why that very afternoon, instead of attending the appointment with the city’s famed couturier, she escaped through the cotton fields and boarded Clementine’s ramshackle car. He greeted her with his full lips and strenuous | … |

Baudelaire would say that every perfect debauch demands perfect leisure. Soon enough, the seats will be taken by a group of gentle men and women of leisure who have paid good money to come here, to get turned on by the sight of our rapture.   We will enter the stage one by one, to | … |

Some discourses allow glimpsing at the structuring traits of a time. “The truth” of a time is revealed not as much by its symbolic regulations as by its manifestations on the bodies. Although both keys are inseparable for thinking a specific culture, a substantial difference determines them: The former places itself on the arbitrary dimension of sense (an established order), the latter, instead, is due to the jouissance of the body (the singular manifestations that arise in it).

Dreams Are Cruel – Cristina Tovar from Backroom Caracas on Vimeo.   Dreams are Cruel is a fragment of the medium-length film Big Ocean of Blues (2016), the most recent work by Cristina Tovar, a Venezuelan filmmaker based in Madrid. It’s an experimental video narrated in first-person, equal parts diaristic and epistolary, oneiric and quotidian. From | … |

  When the end of the world began, Héctor was intertwined with Cyrille, Bartolomé with Amaury, and Celeste with Ananda and Idelisa. I, on the other hand, thought of Jack Veneno. I had first seen him wandering about El Conde in yellow spandex, with his eyes sparkling and his blood turned to rum, when he | … |

  Lento e pianissimo. This is the window of a studio. At this moment he is facing the blank. Allegro. She, a contrabassist by trade, enters suddenly. She looks worried, anxious to begin rehearsing. Work is pressing. She takes the bow, paces from side to side, checks the scores, selects some pages and clips them | … |

I keep a crystal-clear memory from the day it began. I go back to it often. Remembrance is more of a matter of exerting will than memory, a decision made on the very instant, as it elapses. I had spent the entire afternoon trying to break my own record for straight skips with the old | … |

  I reckon the man must have lost his way the night before and walked all day long, if he has appeared here now. I don’t know what the poor devil is doing in this scrap of the world and the desert has taught me to distrust: in the end, it all comes down to | … |

Art will be the revolving door, the language that the soul requires to manifest itself; the means by which we could recover the sense of indissoluble unity between body and spirit, word and object, gesture and reality.

I’m afraid of bacteria. The burgeoning humanitarian crisis has perfected the childish fear of my adulthood. Bacteria are the antagonistic terrain where I become aware that the others are a legendary threat, and where my own body operates through sibylline reasons that do not always flow in my favor.