Full of lush shapes and vivid hues, this film loop was handcrafted using the techniques of phytography and optical printing. Raw visuals drawn from the artist’s garden over a period of two years bathe everything and everyone and confront us with silence. (text by Lesley Loksi Chan from the curatorial notes from Research garden: a compendium of lost moments)
A collaboration between sound artist Vanessa John and experimental media artist, Francisca Duran. Featuring a poem by Chiloe poet, Rosabetty Muñoz.
A collection of dreams and exchanges that I gathered in Toronto during the first 2 months of the covid-19 pandemic.
Sketches created from dreams gifted by dreamers during the covid-19 pandemic. Archive begins on March 10, 2020.
“A textual and textural filmic manifesto combining extracts from Donna Haraway’s essay Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene with in-camera animation, contact printing and phytograms (the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant material and dried in direct sunlight).”
(Kim Knowles, 2019 Edinburgh International Film Festival Catalogue)
An expressive documentary exploring the broad reach of fascism. Footage of a bullfight was buried, transformed by microbes and rephotographed and these abstractions ground the inquiry as to why citizens accept the harm done to others.
8401 is a moving-image and light landscape painting depicting a multi-layered, fragmented view of Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Now a memorial park, Villa Grimaldi was a clandestine detention, torture and extermination centre during the Pinochet regime (1973-90). The image is built of hundreds of images extracted from five years of Google Street Views of the address and site, Avenida José Arrieta 8401.
A single-channel video installation with audio by Paul Shepherd that explores ground and movement around 1 Spadina Crescent in Toronto.
The third part of a series about the legacy of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, this film is a mirror that contemplates how memory might or might not become history, using excerpts from classified CIA correspondence and a photo-montage taken at the Museum of Human Rights and Memory in Santiago Chile.
This single channel video installation belongs to a broader investigation by the artist into memory, dementia and collective forgetting. The video loop serves the larger inquiry as individual and found memory, the recollection of a particularly Canadian summer landscape, and is restructured to produce formal relationships that mirror screening techniques for cognitive impairment and measures of spatial dysfunction. With audio by Paul Shepherd
Retrato Oficial animates the dissimulation and reconstruction of the great liberator of Chile, 19th-century revolutionary and republican Bernardo O’Higgins, and the historical reach of the late-20th-century dictator Augusto Pinochet. Based in part on a conceit borrowed from Raul Ruiz’s essay Images of Images and original footage shot by Patricio Guzman on September 11, 1973, the short video is an exploration of the mediated image and the mnemonic possibilities of video and still image technologies.
An inventive exploration of the visceral nature of sound and how we learned to capture and reproduce it over time. Anchored by the discovery of the phonograph by the brilliant-and deaf-inventor Thomas Edison, this visual and conceptual collage of rich archival footage and animation playfully traces the birth of technological reproduction and the beginnings of our modern, audio-drenched world.
[Gisele Gordon, HotDocs Catalogue, 2008]
n the Kingdom of Shadows documents a paragraph being typeset on an early twentieth-century Ludlow Linecaster. The text is taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of the Lumiere Brothers’ film Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat (1895). As the words melt into a pool of lead, the alchemical magic of printing is linked to that of cinema.
"What does it look like at the beginning? The first time he ever saw a table, the large foot of an adult stepping towards him, a window opening like a heart. Duran offers us rainy moments of Vancouver as an accompaniment to the birth of her first child. A slowly moving hail of abstract nights lights precedes a slow motion birth, recoloured and rephotographed from a TV screen. The artist’s voice offers up a series of dates along with the facts that accompany them, her son’s favourite book, animal and word (No). Each instance of looking arrives in fragments, there is no story to pull it all together, unless it is the story of memory itself, with its necessary omissions, its shorn away pieces and left-overs. The formal experimentalisms and material fetishes that inform this movie appear here as an analogue for memory itself, an inheritance of seeing in the dark. It makes me wonder: is every film the mother of its audience?"
(Mike Hoolboom, Made in Canada: Projections of Beauty)
A rotoscope animation of the filmmaker’s young son on a swing.
A found footage piece consisting of reworked of images of Diana Spencer (Princess Diana). The isolated and manipulated images point to England’s colonial past and to the elusiveness of a media image.
Part two of the artist's trilogy exploring the depiction of sexuality in teen films of the 1980s, in which a scene from "Valley Girl" is re-worked.
A rephotographed excerpt from "Fast Times at Ridgemount High" is reconstituted as seedy pornography.
After declared unfit to stand trial in England, former dictator Augusto Pinochet stands up out of his wheelchair and greets supporters.
In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet launched a violent coup in Chile that overthrew the elected and socialist president Salvador Allende. Thousands were killed, tortured, imprisoned, and exiled as a result. My family was among the many that were exiled in Canada. – Francisca Duran