Cooking with Jorge

Part of Summer 2016

Jorge Lozano is the maker of over 100 movies, a treasure of the local movie scene, his restless visual inventions emerge from a period of Super 8 activism and personal video interludes. In the past dozen years he has divided his time between Colombia and Toronto, which has lent his work a renewed political focus along with a keen aesthetic wit. The centrepiece of tonight’s screening, Watch My Back (40 minutes silent 2010), is an intimate and underground portrait of a Toronto that is rarely granted airtime, as four comrades testify to life in the margins. Jorge’s commitment to experimentalism is animated by the necessity of asking questions (Why this gender? This poverty?), which are forever opening, like the artist’s heart.

The screening will feature a free dinner (!) cooked by Jorge, served at 7:00 PM. Please come by and have a plate, or just come for the movies at 8:00 PM. See Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible: an interview with Jorge Lozano by Mike Hoolboom on our Homepage!
Preceding Cooking with Jorge TIFF Free Screen will be presenting Jorge Lozano: Tactical Visions on Tuesday, June 21, 6:30 PM Free! @ 350 King Street West featuring work from 2005 — 2015.

Program:
Within the isolation of my opulence 12 minutes 2014
Black Box 5 minutes 2006
CloroX 5 minutes 2014
Cleaning Practice 5 minutes 2014
Watch My Back 40 minutes silent 2010

Within the isolation of my opulence 12 minutes 2014
Shot in Toronto during the fifty days of Israel’s invasion of Gaza from July 8 to August 26, 2014. Jorge ventures out into the neighbourhood to make a portrait of a city glowing with self-absorption. A plant that looks like a brain, a stolid stand of towers, iced fish in the market, a mirrored set of shadowed townhouses. Between these composed idylls there are interruptive flashes of a laptop carrying news of a faraway massacre. The citizens of Gaza are being slaughtered, and not for the first time. The movie resolves in the artist’s apartment where the unseeable and unthinkable are broadcast from CNN. A boy lies on a stretcher with a hole where his intestines should be as his father tries to offer reassurance. The intrusion into these private scenes lends a final indignity as the artist struggles to find a place to put them in his apartment. How to make these faraway atrocities feel close?

Black Box 5 minutes 2006
A brief quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (“be not afeard”) begins this walk through time and space, before the movie’s title there is already a sentencing, a text that brings judgments, openings and closings. The movie pictures a deluge of memory, strolling through the architectures of the self, and the buildings that housed those selves, all in a flickering cascade of hand developed pictures. The artist’s body, particularly his sandaled feet and sunglassed face, act as the anchor for the visual cascade. He is trying to hold a balance between past and future as he is pictured walking backwards, into a history of emulsion and projections and the ruined machines that lie mostly forgotten.

CloroX 5 minutes 2014
Made on a flight from Canada to Colombia, the artist offers a ménage a trois, a three-screen affair whose backdrop is a universe of clouds. Inside the plane, dreamers slump in hazy deliriums of light. And between the pictures on display, above and below them, texts are exchanged between lovers. There has been an affair, another man has come between the two of them, but now new vows of fidelity are exchanged. The path will be cleaned. The onscreen text derives, astonishingly, from a found email.

Cleaning Practice 5 minutes 2014
The work doesn’t end. It’s never enough. Film as painting. Self portrait strained through MAX MSP (which also created the live soundtrack), a digital self that is forever entering and exiting the computer. The artist tries to wipe away the traces, only to find himself subject to the same technological imperatives.

Watch My Back 40 minutes silent 2010
Harrowing tales from the neighbourhood. In a suite of four ten-minute portraits, the subject stands with their back to the camera facing a second image, which offers slow pans of what is close by and familiar, or else close-ups of tattoos and skin. A capitalized text appears in short, staccato phrasings offering testimony of migration from Nicaragua or Colombia, a corrosive and systemic racism in Canada, and lives rarely glimpsed in fringe media, filled with violence and poverty. The transcribed testimonies turn biography into poetry.

“Life in jails means to/watch your back. Your friends can become enemies/because of a toothbrush or food/or a phone call./They lose control/from one second to the next./In jail racism works in many ways/majority against minority/hispanos, native and blacks get along/in our eyes, whites are the enemy./We think/they are the ones who put us inside./We reject them, don’t want them close./They can be police or informers or rapists/somehow whites commit those crimes./In the streets racism is different/it has to do with territory./We are separated by racism/the white places are clean, bright/our places are sad, dark, dirty./We don’t want to be there/but they send us there and you can’t say/

No, I don’t want to live here/I want to live in Richmond Hill./In housing rent is cheaper/but life is dirtier/and not normal./I have been here twenty years/and they are deporting me now./I recognize my mistakes/the errors I have committed./I have nothing against anybody/including the police/somehow the police always/had me in front of the cameras./Now, I want to be/behind the cameras./I want to make/my reality visible/I want to be the one/who directs my own life.”

Bio:
Jorge Lozano has been working as a film and video artist for the last 20+ years and has achieved national and international recognition. His fiction films have been exhibited at the Toronto International Film Festival and at the Sundance Film Festival amongst others. His experimental work has been exhibited at many international festivals and galleries. He has expanded his practice to the organization of many cultural and art events, the creation of aluCine, Toronto Latin Media Festival, and facilitating self-representations video workshops for marginalized Latin and non-Latin youth in Canada since 1991, Colombia 2005-2009, and Venezuela 2005.