As part of the current edition of LOOP City Screen Festival, from November 9 to 19, 2022, between 6 pm and 8 pm, RocioSantaCruz will screen “Tierras raras” (2019) by María García Ruiz in the courtyard of the gallery.

“Tierras raras” (Rare earths) marks the materiality of our time. This group of metals, so-called because of the difficulty they encountered at the time of their discovery, are present in almost all the technological devices that define our daily lives: from the screens of cell phones to the batteries of electric cars. Key components of an increasingly digitized world, rare earths are the leitmotif of this video essay, which develops, through an attentive vision of the author’s place of origin, a poetic reflection on the landscape and the gaze that shapes it.
In the midst of landscapes linked to intimacy, satellite images of the world’s largest rare earth mine emerge, in their own digital materiality, with an almost pictorial quality, showing the delicate relationship between beauty and destruction. In turn, Campo de Montiel appears as a strange land, from the shadows of depopulation, threatened by a possible rare earth mine that could lead to its complete devastation. Strangeness is the sensation that accompanies us from Bayan Obo, in China, to the plateau of La Mancha.
But let us not forget that estrangement is the essential condition of any landscape. The gaze that turns to a place to which it no longer belongs and which it barely recognizes, that observes that other that is not itself; that gaze always arises from a process of separation. The distance generated by our gaze on the world is a dangerous zone inhabited by ghosts with the capacity to create new realities. That way of looking, the one that generates the technologies of the territory, but also memories and emotions, can be creative, but also lethal.
Tierras raras is the portrait of an exterior: the plateau, but also of a personal interior crossed by that dry landscape; and a crack, a wound or a mine that mark the transition from one to the other. An unfinished search, an impossible displacement that, like a Moebius strip, always ends up confusing the inside with the outside. (*)

(*) Text extracted from the web page of María García Ruiz.

ACTIVITY:
Thursday, November 17 at 7 pm – María García Ruiz will talk to us about her work in the gallery.

Technical details :
Tierras raras (2019, 28:23 min)
Direction and voice:María García Ruiz
With:Margot Bassols
Image:Raúl Jiménez
Sound:Hamid E. Martín
Music:Pedro G. Romero (Chord nº 10)
Editing: Federico Delpero Bejar,María García Ruiz
Postproduction: Federico Delpero Bejar
Texts: María García Ruiz with Federico Delpero Bejar, a quote by Jean-Marc Besse and some words by Giorgio Agamben.
Work made thanks to the MULTIVERSO Grant for Creation in Video Art 2017, BBVA Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY
María García Ruiz is a visual artist and researcher.

She holds a degree in Architecture, a master’s degree in Art and Design Research and a PhD in Philosophy.
The projects she develops are focused on the production -physical and imagined- of the territory, through the articulation of hybrid narratives between image, writing and action.

She is currently developing her practice as an artist in residence at Hangar (2022-2024).

Accésit in the Biennal d’Art Diputació de Tarragona (2021), selected artist in Fotonoviembre, Festival Internacional de Fotografía de Tenerife (2021), in 2020 she receives the V Grant for Artistic Research Fundación Banco Sabadell – Hangar. Curator, together with Pedro G. Romero, of the project Máquinas de vivir. Flamenco and architecture in the occupation and unoccupation of spaces (2017-2018) and co-author of the homonymous book (Puente Editores, 2020). Coordinator of the platform Topographies of urban discrepancy at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona (2016-2017). Researcher in residence at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid (2015-2016).

Her work has been shown in spaces such as the Secession in Vienna, the Kunstverein in Stuttgart, the Museum of Reus, the MUSAC in León, Fabra i Coats in Barcelona, the TEA in Tenerife and the Museum of Modern Art in Tarragona, among others.