Jan, 2017: Mar Ordonez

  • Mar Ordonez ¡DESPIERTA!

    Original title: iDespierta! (Wake up)

    Year: 2016

    Format: Super 8. Black and white.

    Duration: 45”

    Screenplay: Mar Ordonez

    Synopsis: A mandarin diamond flutters in a woman’s restless sleep.

    Cast: María Vermelles

  • Mar Ordonez Collages

    Original title: Collages

    Year: 2016

    Format: Photo collage

    Duration: 34”

    Music: Marcos Jávega

    Synopsis: Mar Ordonez’s face suddenly crops up in film stills, magazine adverts and the portrait of Miss America 1972.

    Cast: Mar Ordonez

  • Mar Ordonez Dormir más que vivir

    Original title: Dormir más que vivir (Sleeping more than living)

    Year: 2016

    Format: Super 8. Black and white.

    Duration: 2:10 min

    Screenplay: Marcos Jávega

    Live sound: Claudi Dosta

    Costumes: Emiliano Di Mola

    Make-up and hairdressing: Benjamín Pérez

    Synopsis: On one end of the phone line, a man who fears he is losing his memory is talking to a woman who seems to know him well. On the other end, she tries to help him remember.

    Cast: Alba Cros & David Marmota

  • Mar Ordonez Animales exaltados

    Original title: Animales exaltados (Exalted animals)

    Year: 2016

    Format: Super 8. Black and white. Stop motion.

    Duration: 15”

    Music: Silent

    Synopsis: A family of deer loses one of its members. A swan faces a very windy day.

  • Mar Ordonez Anémonas

    Original title: Anémonas (Anemones)

    Year: 2016

    Format: Video collage. Colour

    Duration: 16”

    Music: Silent

    Synopsis: Self-portrait of Mar Ordonez lifting her skirt to reveal a sphere that reveals to us the life of marine flora and fauna in a satire of the exhibitionism on the social networks.

    Cast: Mar Ordonez

  • Mar Ordonez Dear Double

    Original title: Dear Double

    Year: 2016

    Format: Mini DV. Black and white.

    Duration: 52”

    Screenplay: Mar Ordonez

    Music: Marcos Jávega

    Synopsis: Two similar women. Two identical wine glasses. Agonizing date of a woman with her double.

    Cast: Mar Ordonez

  • Mar Ordonez Born too late

    Original title: Born too late

    Year: 2015

    Format: Video collage. Black and white.

    Duration: 15”

    Screenplay: Mar Ordonez

    Music: “Born too late”, Poni Tails

    Synopsis: Film or video conference? Recording or retransmission? A woman challenges the only viewer in a dark cinema with her gaze.

    Cast: Mar Ordonez & Marcos Jávega

  • Mar Ordonez Herida

    Original title: Herida (Wound)

    Year: 2016

    Format: 16mm. Colour.

    Duration: 1’ 05”

    Screenplay: Mar Ordonez

    Sound: Marcos Jávega & Mar Ordonez

    Costumes: Emiliano Di Mola

    Make-up and hairdressing: Lola Martínez

    Synopsis: Obscure ceremony in which a man dressed in black inflicts wounds on a naked woman just by uttering the word “wound”.

    Cast: María Flores & Marcos Jávega

  • Mar Ordonez Test #1

    Year: 2015

    Format: Video collage

    Duration: 16”

    Music: Marcos Jávega

    Synopsis: A woman giving a hug with her head in the clouds.

  • Mar Ordonez Igual que nosotros

    Original title: Igual que nosotros (Just like us)

    Year: 2016

    Format: Mini DV. Colour.

    Duration: 1’30”

    Screenplay: Marcos Jávega

    Sound: Marcos Jávega & Mar Ordonez

    Synopsis: Two heads enclosed in separate screens try to consummate an act of communication.

    Cast: Mar Ordonez & Marcos Jávega

  • Mar Ordonez Man Ray Assay

    Original title: Man Ray Assay

    Year: 2016

    Format: Super 8. Black and white.

    Duration: 50”

    Music: Marcos Jávega

    Synopsis: A man and a woman freely interpret some Man Ray photographs.

    Cast: Mar Ordonez & Marcos Jávega

  • Mar Ordonez Todos los ausentes

    Original title: Todos los ausentes (All the absent)

    Year: 2016

    Format: Super 8. Black and white.

    Duration: 1:15”

    Screenplay: Mar Ordonez

    Music: Marcos Jávega

    Synopsis: Two lovers and a silver hand are linked by the tissue of a dream of anguish and pleasure.

    Cast: Mar Ordonez & Marcos Jávega

  • Mar Ordonez Exhalaciones

    Original title: Exhalaciones (Exhalations)

    Year: 2016

    Format: 16mm. Colour.

    Duration: 2’09”

    Screenplay: Marcos Jávega

    Live sound: Claudi Dosta

    Costumes: Emiliano Di Mola

    Make-up and hairdressing: Benjamín Pérez

    Synopsis: A forensic doctor and his young secretary are investigating the death of a corpse brought to the morgue in circumstances that relate it with a rare case of zoophilia and necrophilia.

    Cast: David Domingo & Antoni Amaya

Mar Ordonez (Palma, 13 February 1986) is a Barcelona-based artist who works with analogue photography and experimental video art. Principally known for portraying women from a singular viewpoint, her creations address issues such as identity, doubles and the body as a form of expression and language. Mar Ordonez continues the surrealist tradition both in her exploration of the unconscious and in the constant search for beauty. Her short films invite the viewer to become a voyeur of intimate and sometimes uncomfortable stories that swing between ironic exhibitionism, the theatre of the absurd and dreams that turn into nightmares.

http://www.marordonez.com/

 

Account must be taken of the depth of the dream. For the most part I retain only what I can glean from its most superficial layers. What I most enjoy contemplating about a dream is everything that sinks back below the surface in a waking state, everything I have forgotten about my activities in the course of the preceding day, dark foliage, stupid branches. In “reality,” likewise, I prefer to fall.

André Breton, First Surrealist Manifesto

Marcel Duchamp said that “words have absolutely no possibility of expressing anything; as soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted”. He was not the only one who thought this way; Samuel Beckett had a similar opinion—“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”—though well aware of the impossibility of relinquishing them: “Words are all we have.” The constant challenge of communication with words puts the limits of language to the test, showing up its weaknesses but also showing its numerous virtues. Likewise, the use of the image, be it static or moving, raises dilemmas of a similar kind. In an epoch characterized by the overproduction of information, whether in the form of striking images or stunning tweets or posts in the social media, blind faith in the supposed objectivity of this information can lead to more than one misunderstanding, resulting in disappointment or even a constant feeling of helplessness. The solution—if there is one—could lie in the pages of the surrealist manifest that Breton wrote in 1924, and in insistence on the importance of dreams in structuring an increasingly elusive and harried reality.

The work of Mar Ordonez picks up the proposal made almost a hundred years ago by the surrealists and uses some of their precepts freely and thought-provokingly to interpret a constantly changing and evolving world. Ordonez realizes that the work is not produced solely by the so-called artist, but that the role of the spectator is also fundamental as that of the person who concludes it (if it is possible to “conclude” a work) by giving it one or several meanings. Some of her works, just 15 seconds long, are presented to the spectator as a kind of Western haiku (many of them in black and white) that uses the cinema image (often Super 8 or 16mm) to transmit a short scene, a fleeting sensation, that may be interpreted in numerous ways by a probing spectator. The (self)portrait, representation, identity, gender, beauty and the search for the unconscious are frequent elements in her work. Using a subtle irony, not without a touch of melancholy that takes us back to the seventies, eighties or even nineties, when the Internet had not yet transformed our lives. Using the techniques of the analogue era in a predominantly digital, precipitate and binary context. Exploring the limits of the body as an element for reflection. Knowing, in short, that the contemporary spectator is transformed with each passing minute.

Marla Jacarilla (Visual artist and writer)

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