A singular contribution

The anarchic, impertinent, enthusiastic and surprising work of Albert Serra will be coming to the Biennale festival in Venice in the first week of May, a month earlier than usual. The filmmaker from Banyoles, considered in recent years a visionary in his treatment of the image, will represent Catalonia at the event under the sponsorship of the Institut Ramon Llull.

The Catalan pavilion at the event - this is the fourth year - has never generated so much expectation, which has grown still since Serra's proposal was presented in London and Barcelona last month. What Serra has created for the pavilion is a series of short film clips that together make up a whopping five hours of film. In case there are doubts about the level of expectation surrounding the film, the head of cinema at the Tate Modern, Andrea Lissoni, predicts that Serra will be one of the stars of the Venice festival this year.

Serra will take with him to Venice, Singularity, a free-form exercise in cinema he has created under the curation of Chus Martínez. The work focuses on the age of technology: “The idea dominating Singularity is the loss of the body's centrality: emotions, spirituality...they are now deposited in devices,” says Serra about the film. According to the director, his work will be “strange and asphyxiating” because of the difficulty of distinguishing between what is real and what is artificial.

Beyond this, trying to pin down the plot of his Venice project would be a waste of time, or worse, to confuse the project with the tropes of conventional film that he hates so much: “It won't be about anything and will be about everything,” says Martínez, who has played a key role in producing a work likely to have such a “Baroque effect”, according to Serra.

The project will be shown on five screens in the darkened pavilion. For Martínez, the important thing is not what the audiovisual installation shows, but rather what it proposes: a visionary reflection of an age of radical change on the threshold of a new world, “that will probably be installed within a decade.”

The curator also points to the ambitious nature of the project: “We want to take to Venice a way of making culture that will carry thought a little further forward,” she says. In fact, Serra and Martínez have been polishing the experimental project for a good part of a year.

The clips, filmed with some 15 non-professional actors, as is Serra's custom, were shot in Lleida and Ireland, with a mine and a brothel the settings for what happens, or does not happen, according to the curator. Added to this is a process of editing without planning and totally improvised that relies on the director's raw talent.

With the Venice festival, Serra will have participated in the two most important annual events of the art world. Three years ago, Serra's was included in the Documenta festival in Kassel. Few question the presence of Serra's work in events that go beyond the world of cinema. Though their work is distinct, Serra often invokes the name of Andy Warhol, and always gives credit to the influence of surrealism.

The Catalan pavilion –not official– will be part of the Eventi Collaterali, at a cost of half a million euros. Yet, it fits well with the –official– Spanish pavilion, focusing on Dalí's nourishment of today's artists. The pavilion is curated by Martí Manen, from Barcelona, and one artist is the Catalan, Francesc Ruiz.

Singularity opens in Venice on May 6, where it will spend the whole summer and part of autumn. In December, it will go on display in La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona.