The theme of the 23rd edition of the Loop Festival, Miratges Mirages, unites its multiple projects to highlight how moving images create special visions and encounters. A mirage is often described as something negative: an illusion, a dangerous perspective, a powerful attracting force. Yet a mirage is also an artistic phenomenon: films and books, both for children and adults, often picture it as something magical that appears in times of need. The 23rd edition of Loop Festival thinks of the mirage as images of something desired, which appear for us, even if for fleeting moments, to bring joy, energy, trust and enthusiasm.

Mirages can be seen but not touched, they radiate and vibrate but they have no matter, they can be individual and collective. Just like the moving image works that are presented during the festival. Miratges Miratges celebrates the capacity of the human mind to desire, create and project images. Exploring the relationship between cinema, imagination and perception, between bodies, landscapes and art, Miratges Mirages will bring to Barcelona a curated selection of films, videos and installations, presented in collaboration with the city’s artistic and cultural institutions. Engaging, mesmerising, diverse and accessible, the artworks presented attest to artists’ cinema’s unique capacity to represent and dialogue with the present times, in their complexity and fascination. These works will engage with such topics as technology, ecology and identity. 

A mirage is a vision of hope and regeneration when it is most needed. It is a projection, half illusion and half real, a desired and attractive image, an oasis. A mirage is an apparition, a hallucination, a chimera, a phantasmagoria: a figure of the mind inscribed into the retina and projected onto a landscape. Originated in the early 19th century, when the triangular relationship between the discovery of the unconscious, the encounter with the exotic world and the experimentation with systems of mechanical reproduction of the real were at their peak, the mirage came to define a horizon of possibilities conveyed by an optical manifestation. 

Mirages originate from mirare in Latin, meaning to ‘look at’, which declinated into mirar-se, to look at oneself, to be reflected. Standing across the image of oneself and the projection of the self into the world, the image that exists and the image that is created by the imagination, the mirage is a quintessential cinematic entity. 

Artists have been using film and video to create visions that did not exist before and fleeting images that, like a mirage, appear and disappear in front of our eyes. As such, Loop Festival will conjure a series of mirages across the city, generating fascinating and magical encounters with contemporary creations of moving images and activating experiences that evolve through them: exhibitions, talks, conversations and live acts that propose what a mirage is and can be. Through these initiatives, the 23rd editon of Loop Festival will, once more, shape and redefine what artists’ cinema is and what it does in our present-future, contributing to place Barcelona at the core of artistic, cultural, technological and intellectual production. (Filipa Ramos, Loop Festival Artistic Director)

Out of the many proposals of Loop Festival’s program of exhibitions, live performances, talks, and activities: the exhibition To the Wind at Casa Elizalde, a reflection on the links between translation and censorship by artist Mar Reykjavik; the screening of Billy Roisz’s film Garden of Electric Delights, curated by Júlia Polo at Casa Seat, on the themes of interferences and materiality in film; On Lines, the first live audiovisual collaboration between Iraqi experimental musician Dania Shihab and Chilean filmmaker Carlos Vásquez Méndez, who will explore the concept of the line as a boundary and threshold at CCCB, in collaboration with the L’Alternativa Festival; Trùng mù – Endless, sightless, a screening and conversation with artist Phuong Linh Nguyen at MACBA, in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation; the showcase of Julia Montilla’s Video Creation award-winning film Strawberry Fields at La Fabra; a solo exhibition by artist Ana Vaz, curated by einaidea at Museu de la Música, which will showcase career-defining works of her research on the trajectories of historic and contemporary colonialism and the co-existence of human and non-human forms; a Joan Jonas exhibition at Museu Picasso, drawing a line between the legacy of the two artists, united by their political commitment and idea of art as a tool of resistance; the screening of Albert Serra’s film at Museu Tàpies – fe sense obres morta és, which delves into one of the most emotional and surprising aspects of Antoni Tàpies’ universe; screenings of Elena del Rivero’s works at Soho House; an exhibition by Elyla at Fundació Enric Miralles; and an opening night with Los Ingrávidos and a live concert by Joao Pais at the Hivernacle.