Mimesis Without Organs: A Problem with the GPS
Still from Watch the Skies (2018)
Where: Visual Arts Complex Auditorium 1B20, University of Colorado, Boulder
When: April 1, 2025 @ 6:00 PM
Their “…observational documentary…conveys a profound sense of culture and place through poetic compositions and myriad allusions and juxtapositions….”
– J.J. Murphy, author of The Black Hole of the Camera:The Films of Andy Warhol and The Florida Project
Daniel Boord and Luis Valdovino have been collaborating since 1990. Working at the fringes of art, ethnography, and documentary, they have invented their own form for their journeys: part travelogue, part essay, part scrapbook, and part poetry. They favor an open road, wandering through everyday life and feeling their way through cultural histories, visible “in the soil” but rapidly vanishing. For example, in Contigo we spend a Sunday afternoon in San Antonio listening to a song sung by the son of one of the pioneers of conjunto music. In Not Enough Night, past and present converge in Longmont, Colorado, on the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, as a small 1937 gas station, mentioned in the book, is moved to a new development in the suburbs. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen was prompted by the auctioning off of the largest antiquarian bookstore in the United States in Archer City, Texas, where The Last Picture Show was written and filmed. And in their video Standards they tour the 20th century to bid it farewell.
Their work has been widely exhibited, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Oberhausen Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany; Robert Flaherty Film Seminar; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. They have been nominated twice for a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship.
Sponsored by:
Art & Art History Department
The Brakhage Center for Media Arts
The Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media