Matadero Madrid center for contemporary creation

CARLOS CASAS

DEPTH OF FIELD
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The DocumentaMadrid Festival and Matadero programme the work of Carlos Casas, an international artist whose work is about contemporary documentary cinema.
Matadero Madrid and DocumentaMadrid, the 16th edition of the Documentary Film Festival promoted by the Madrid City Council that will take place between 9 and 19 May, present the first retrospective of Carlos Casas in Spain. The Barcelona artist will be the protagonist of the new installment of 'Depth of Field'.

Carlos Casas (Barcelona, 1974) takes us on a journey to the most far-flung and forgotten places on the planet, places that mark their cardinal points with terra firma. Attracted by the wealth of the collective imaginary evoked by these spaces ″at the end of the world″, Casas has visited remarkable spots during the last two decades in order to record them, live in them and understand them, capturing them in works that straddle documentary filmmaking, the visual arts and ethnography, the ″science of people″. 

'End Trilogy', which we present in the central space in the room, is a powerful demonstration of Casas’s interest in freezing remote landscapes and capturing the experience of their inhabitants engaged in constant combat against the elements, as well as his desire to preserve with his camera the beauty of simple, everyday rituals and the memory of those performing them for what is very nearly the last time. The three feature-length films that make up the trilogy, filmed between 2002 and 2008, look at diverse settings in which traditional ways of life and subsistence practices are disappearing. 

'Solitude at the End of the World' (2002–2005) is set in Patagonia, one of the most unpopulated regions of the world due to its extreme climate. Casas resurrects the myths surrounding these lands in the far south through the account of three men living in complete isolation.

In 'Aral. Fishing in an Invisible Sea' (2004), Casas gives us insights into one of the most glaring environmental disasters: the drying-up of the Aral Sea by the Soviet authorities, which turned one of the largest lakes on Earth into a desert in just a few years.

The last of the films in this trilogy is 'Hunters Since the Beginning of Time' (2008), shot in Chukotka on the Siberian shore of the Bering Sea, where whalers continue to pursue one of the oldest traditions in marine hunting. 

Casas took a more experimental starting point when he began his 'Fieldworks' in 2000, an ongoing, almost encyclopaedic project that includes a series of works made using archive material, images and radio signals captured in situ in various places.  


Depth of Field

"Depth of Field" is a programme that focuses on the production, screening and study of contemporary audiovisual practice. The aim of "Depth of Field" is to offer an in-depth consideration of the work of audiovisual artists (those who produce their work in video format, those who engage in a dialogue with film and other media, and those whose work takes the form of installations with moving images of a very varied nature). Through the presentation of works by established and up-and-coming creators, this programme is intended to help to generate an ongoing space for dialogue in which the artists’ pieces complement each other and contribute to a better understanding of this medium.

After an initial season focusing on the subject of violence, explored through the work of Meiro Koizumi and María Ruido, the second season of "Depth of Field" looks at the issue of ethnography by screening and examining the work of Carlos Casas (May–June) and Ana Vaz (July–August). Two artists whose oeuvres present natural environments and the people who dwell in them as a means to consider historical, political and cultural issues.

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Solitude at the End of the World (2002-2005)
Aral. Fishing in an Invisible Sea (2004)
Hunters Since the Beginning of Time (2008)