by Diego Ginartes
“The best examples of termite art appear in places other than films, where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly selfinvolved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.”
– White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art. Manny Farber, Film Culture, no. 27 (Winter 1962-63)
There is something transcendental that happens when one sits in a dark room and a projector throws light onto a white screen. Whatever appears there, whether it arrives from a 35mm print, an 8mm loop, or a digital file, exercises a spectral and almost holistic power over us. We enter the darkness dimension, and we expect to be illuminated – in whichever broad spectrum that illumination may be understood. That much, at least, is shared between the hegemonical conventional narrative cinema and the most radical avant-garde. Perhaps the difference lies in what the images ask of us or how they speak to us when they arrive.
Certainly illuminating, but just as often disorienting, there are films that resist easy labels. They're tentative, speculative, and driven by ideas that feel genuinely original – in the sense that they tend to return to the raison d’être of cinema itself. They don't fit into the categories we've inherited from the dominant film history, but instead invite us to situate them within a whole different genealogy in the ever-malleable and elusive terrain in-between cinema and visual arts. Artists' moving image, non-fiction, expanded cinema, essay film, live cinema performance, and beyond, embrace a vast and fluid territory defined by medium, form or subject matter. However, and despite its differences, they share a common pulsion. Which it is perhaps best captured by Manny Farber in his 1962 essay at Film Culture White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art, where he describes a "termite art" that shows "no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement." Moving through images the way a termite moves through wood—leaving traces, opening spaces, and making room for something that was not there before. And at the same time, challenging not only the conventions of normative cinema, but offering alternative ways to experience and envision the world.
The termite artist inhabits a paradox: while building their shelter, they remain exposed. Shelter not as a space of safeguarding, but as a place of contestation and resistance, one with the capacity to reactivate spaces and reconvert them from within. And at the same time, their creative practice exposes them: it strips them bare before a territory of unknown contingencies, forcing them to confront their own creative vulnerabilities – and, at times, those of others. From the tension between these forces emerges a stimulating friction that could lie at the existential core of much moving image practice that Cinéstesia explores through its programme.
And alongside it, Cinéstesia Notes – conceived as a meeting point that extends the experience beyond the act of perception itself: a space where, through the written word, the fissures produced by the constant friction inherent in these works can be explored to enable potential reflection. Through a series of texts in different formats – book excerpts, interviews, conversations, and essays – Cinéstesia Notes seeks to create a parallel venue to the cinema where the ideas and propositions within these works can flourish, allowing the ecosystem of cinematic art to expand and breathe more freely beyond the physicality. To write alongside the moving image works is to reinforce the communal experience they make possible, ultimately, as a kind of trance ritual, call the images back to us.
Undoubtedly, Cinéstesia Notes is born with a termite spirit: a desire to challenge and break through established boundaries, leaving each text as a trace and a point of departure for reflections yet to come. It seeks to speak from a position of dissidence towards the hegemonic narrative cinema, while also exposing the inherent vulnerabilities to the field. With the humbleness this endeavour demands, we offer these texts as exercises in thought, in process, hoping that they might trigger new encounters, new ideas, and, perhaps, new forms of creation – whichever form they might take.
Diego Ginartes
Cinéstesia Programme Producer