Artists: Marga Almirall, Carolina Astudillo, Salut Baldirà, Allison Figueroa Rojas, Laura Ginès, Francesca Llopis, Raquel Marques, Cloe Masotta, Cristina Mora Cobos, Anne Murray, Eva Ortega Puig, Elda Isavelina Ortiz Rivas, Maria Pagès, María Paton Martínez, Paulina Quiroz Navarro, Martina Rogers, María Romero, Marina Siero and Diana Toucedo

Curators: Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones de Barcelona and Cloe Masotta

Ever since 1896, women have contributed to the realm of cinema an abundance of creations worthy of admiration stemming from their particular experiences in the world. The discovery of this surprising, inspiring and significant archipelago of female culture has been the raison d’être of the work of the Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones de Barcelona during the thirty years that it has been running.

Constructing, reconstructing, restoring and weaving genealogies of film on the basis of pleasure, enjoyment and creativity. Subverting the dictates of academia, the androcentric narratives of the History of Film (with capital letters, naturally), those carefully refined lists, polished and repolished, that indicate who deserves to appear, to feature in textbooks (very few of them women and often limited to a specific chapter). Resurrecting the pioneering women, establishing connections between them and women filmmakers today, discrediting the narrative of exceptionality—women filmmakers as mythological beings, Amazons who emerge suddenly over the course of history to the surprise and fascination of the public.

This was the basis from which we convened the first edition of the Archipelago Project in 2017. Which woman filmmaker would you pay tribute to with a piece of your own creation? We sent our proposition out into the world and the response was not long in coming: we received dozens of audiovisual proposals (videos, gifts, photographs and texts). An archipelago that has gradually grown over the years and that we have decided to use to construct a collective tribute to the women filmmakers who have shaped our universe, a tribute that also signifies that we accept the legacy they have bequeathed us and that constitutes evidence that we have taken up their baton and that there is a continuity.

In this spirit of enjoyment and collective creation, we invited Cloe Masotta—the thinker, theorist, teacher and a reference for us—to imagine a route through this Archipelago. This is her proposal, one of many possibilities, her navigation chart. Thank you to all of you for accompanying us on this voyage.

ROUTES OF DESIRE, HISTORIES OF FILM
Cloe Masotta

By resurrecting and championing so many women filmmakers, many of them missing from books on film, and from screening rooms too, the Archipelago Project is an invitation through audiovisual creation to question a certain canon of film history, in which many women filmmakers have been systematically rendered invisible. So, we might think of this film-loving geography as an archive that grows thanks to the new awareness of the women filmmakers selected each year, those to whom we pay tribute, and thanks as well to the many gazes of women creators who reflect themselves in their images in order to imagine new ones.

In cities, pathways or lines of desire emerge in unexpected places. They are routes designed by intuition and the footsteps repeated day after day by men and women passing through places not necessarily intended to be traversed. And what if the history of film as it is written was like the major highways that thousands of people drive along each day, without either perceiving them or realising that they are the product of a series of decisions, and alongside these highways there were these other paths that are the fruit of the desire and care of those who travel them each day?

I propose that we think of these invisible lines between the various Islands in the Archipelago Project as maritime routes that guide us across a new map and which invite us to discover all those women who have often been silenced by the official account. Because there is not just one history of film but many that are written or drawn on the basis of the paths of desire of women viewers who, in the Archipelago Project, are creators, who are viewers who are creators… Routes of desire that we trace from one film to another, from one woman filmmaker to another and from one woman filmmaker to ourselves when we become viewers-creators.

A chart for navigating through Arxipèlag

I too found myself one summer afternoon recording on my mobile phone, capturing the dance of my bare feet and the pink of my dress blowing about over the green of a meadow in Galicia, capturing the sunbeams glimmering on the Tâmega River, and paying tribute with El agua acaricia mis pies, el sol mece mi vestido (2019, The Water Caresses My Feet, the Sun Rocks My Dress) to three women filmmakers who all passed away in 2019, Agnès Varda, Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann, three leading figures who have influenced my gaze and my writing. Archipelago invites us to experiment, to play and to discover film. And it suggests that there is not one history of film but as many as we can imagine and desire through our fascinated gaze, and proposes that we discover numerous routes for navigating through the memory of images. Of all those you can imagine, it is a matter of identifying a map open to as many routes as the gazes that look at it. I propose five: Harvesters of images; The ages of skin; Playing, singing and dancing; Caressing the landscape, and Metamorphosis-transfiguration.