El gest de filmar. El vídeo a la Col·lecció MACBA

They are presenting a new exhibition from the MACBA Collection, dedicated to the presence of video, which articulates three moments and contexts of the moving image, embodied in three proposals: Contrainformació: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, Ecos. Vídeos de la donació de la Fundació Han Nefkens i Pere Portabella: la mirada compromesa. These three initiatives are integrated within a single constellation of practices that understand video as a form of attention to the real: it is not only a matter of recording, but also of activating gazes, presences and stories often situated on the margins of official history.Thus, in Contrainformació: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, the audiovisual device operates not only as a tool of recording, but as a situated and collective practice, inseparable from the social contexts in which it emerges. This material gathers social and political realities that are stratified at a key moment of historical reconstruction and informational accumulation, the first years of the Transition, and vindicates them from a critical perspective. The camera becomes a space of dialogue and co-responsibility, where communities actively participate in the production of their own image and in the construction of an archive that is, at once, memory and process.The video works presented in Ecos. Vídeos de la donació de la Fundació Han Nefkens extend this same concern from the field of contemporary artistic practice. These pieces incorporate contemporary and counter-narrative languages: the texture of the image becomes more experiential, the narration ceases to be linear, experimentation is explored, and languages of juxtaposition are investigated. Through diverse formal strategies, they approach the intimate, the social and the political as territories of experience, configuring video as a place of listening and critical thought.Also part of this itinerary is Pere Portabella: la mirada compromesa, a programme of screenings dedicated to the films of the filmmaker within the framework of «Acció Portabella». A selection that allows the set of registers around video and the moving image present in the museum's collection to be expanded, and that brings us close to the radicalness of Portabella's cinema. A radicalness that subverts the narrative forms of the filmic tradition and with a certain political gaze.Contrainformació: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, Ecos. Vídeos de la donació de la Fundació Han Nefkens i Pere Portabella: la mirada compromesa can be understood as three capsules that, from different contexts and moments, explore the critical potential of the moving image for thinking about the relationship between document, testimony and experience. Understanding video as a documentation platform—even in its most expanded forms—implies, at the same time, recognising its relational condition. Every recording practice presupposes a collectivity, which this presentation proposal of the MACBA Collection seeks to appeal to.