LOOP Barcelona 2023

Since 2003, LOOP Barcelona has been a recognized known platform for the dissemination, discussion, and creation of audiovisual artworks. Under its three main formats, that of a festival, an art fair and a programme of knowledge exchange and debates, it is carrying out a continued exploration of the latest productions that emerge from the contemporary art practices related to video, film and the overarching concept of the moving image. 

Every year, LOOP Barcelona presents the works of hundreds of artists from all over the world to thousands of visitors at more than one hundred locations across the city and its metropolitan area, in museums and galleries, hotels and restaurants, public spaces and shops.

Moreover, a major concern of LOOP Barcelona has been to offer artists a platform to reflect and enroll in practices that strengthen their social role. Therefore, many of the artistic productions supported by the festival aim to capture the intricate layers that animate the notion of public space and the various constructs that define people’s sense of belonging, as well as to delve into the intimate ways in which individuals relate to the world. In essence, LOOP’s Barcelona mission is to assist artists in conveying experiential aspects that are the challenging to observe in material terms, and to shed light on the underlying and often overlooked elements that are fundamental to the use, meaning and construction of places. 

Activities

The 2023 A-Place programme within the LOOP Barcelona festival included two main block of activities:

- screening of the two video productions commissioned by Loop, “The machine and the flower”, by Pau Faus (artist-in-residence), and “We are here”, Camila Flores-Fernández (open call)

- debates with authors and guest speakers around themes related to the video works. 

Objectives

One of the main objectives of LOOP Barcelona is to highlight the capacity of video art to open debates in order to strengthen the links between people and the places they live in, a valuable methodological tool for the analysis and construction of places as it has a lot to do with the construction of space, with the experimentation of place through the relationship between time and reality.

LOOP’s thesis is that video art is able to create both contexts and contents that contribute to the perception of place and the individual artists' perceptions represent concrete issues of their own communities: their works bring their arguments closer and stimulate questions about the way we live and inhabit a place.

Ultimately, by creating, showing new environments, each of these artists reinforces and expands the paradigm of their projects, blurring the boundary between the screen and the reality of the viewer's surroundings, creating their own sense of belonging from the experiences.