The Machine Dreams of Smoke arises from the Museo Reina Sofía’s invitation to Eli Cortiñas (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1979) to revisit The Most Given of Givens, a video-graphic work the artist made in 2016, and a piece recently acquired for the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. The exhibition returns to, expands upon and updates research started by Cortiñas more than a decade ago, in a work which addresses the relationships between the history of cinema, the history of museums and recent digital culture from a perspective that reveals the complex colonial apparatus that moulds the gaze and the construction of imagery and knowledge.
In The Most Given of Givens, Cortiñas focuses on film, a machine which, across the twentieth century, centralised image production and, as a result, determined the bodies to be represented and the memories and narratives to be legitimised, configuring a specific regime of visuality. Through meticulous archive work on found footage, the artist analyses the film images of Tarzan, unearthing how Hollywood adventure films made use of ethnographic film to produce popular imagery of African peoples as an “other” translated through a colonial gaze and logic.