"In what was my third visit to La Havana and initially a trip commissioned to experimentally register the making of a public sculpture, I found myself walking while waiting. Waiting, together with the main artists, to know if the making of the piece would even take place while some permits were on hold. Uncertainty and my limited time there, a little over a month, uncoupled the works. I found myself walking, revisiting, but also filming. Filming mostly the neighborhood in which we stayed: El Vedado - Calle 9 between L and J, Parque de los suspiros… Ascending and descending numbers and letters, bumping and u-turning at the Malecon, Alemendares River, or Zapata. My own sort of Magna Doodle* drawing with the district. Doubling paths again and again, each time with new play… asked to record a race, a domino game, a dance made up of some local gestures a friend taught me. Doubling paths with faces, sites, trees, cats that would start to become familiar. Doubling paths with my own memories of having been there as a child, as a teen… Coppelia again and again, eat ice cream, sit in the park, now with wifi. It is and it isn’t a film of Havana; somehow it can and can’t be a film of Havana, in the same way a stroll is and isn’t just walking."
* magnetic drawing toy
Manuela de Laborde's art and cinema practice meditates upon the materiality of things right up to their possible virtuality, is composed of minimalist works inspired by simplicity of expression, the economy of proposals and the place of exhibition. In 2021, Laborde had her first retrospective at DocumentaMadrid and was previously artist-in-residence at the Tamayo Museum with her educational project -ito/-ita, as well as a resident at LIFT (Link of Independent Filmmakers in Toronto, CA) and of the International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen - Conditional Cinema Program (2018-2022), for which she produced her film Ficciones, recently presented at the New York Film Festival (NYFF) and the BFI London Film Festival. Her thesis film, AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN, was selected by more than 20 festivals, among them: MoMA + FSLC, the 20th Sesc_ Videobrasil Contemporary Art Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and Rotterdam International Film Festival. In 2019, she presented, together with Jenny Berger Myhre, the piece Notes and notes and notes... at Casa de Lago, CDMX, and Borealis Festival for Experimental Music.
Laborde studied Tapestry/Intermedia at the Edinburgh College of Art and received an MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. Between studies, she had her solo exhibition, "Maquettes", at Generator Projects - Dundee.
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