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Edinburgh and Glasgow will see a weekend long retrospective into contemporary colombian animation including the presence of the great artist Carlos Santa. Considered the father of artistic animation in Colombia, Santa has been a reference for a whole generation of artists not just in Colombia but the whole of Latin America.
A very rare chance to meet one of the pioneers of Latin American animation in Europe.
Carlos Santa is the father of experimental animation in Colombia and mentor of many young Colombian artists today.His film work begins with a magical encounter between the fine arts and time. His works are paintings, drawings, engravings and sculptures that seduce us for their beauty, but finally shock us by revealing the complex role of contemporary artist immersed in his own tragedies. These innovative experimental films utilize a range of animation techniques, from rotoscoping to under-the-camera animation, challenging concepts of traditional cinema.
His animated full-length film The Strange Presages of León Prozak was praised and selected in festivals worldwide including some of the biggest Animation meccas like Annecy or Animafest Zagreb.
ABOUT THE MASTERCLASS
The architecture of time
There are many topics to deal with in animation. On one hand, the history of cinema does not articulate animation as part of it and the same happens with cinematographic theory; there is ample ground to reflect upon.
Animation does not represent or trace facts, it creates them, its characters, its movements did not exist previously, the artist creates them and they always live in the present. In its origin the animation does not have that touching property of being in two times at the same time as traditional cinematography does.
Indeed, the characters or the spots, including the temporality of obturation of two frames per image, makes that movement unique, that manipulation of time does not contain the paradox of being the capture of a real time that happened. It is a movement (live) made in the cinema.
However, animation has its own paradox. The animation of the plastic arts intends for each photogram to be a work of art that merits being observed for a while, and at the same time one that can be hung and observed as a particular work. In this sense, it could be said that the plastic arts in general are a centrifugal art that pretend to contain within itself the artistic expression, to say it all in one image. A time without time, the promise of immortality.
Cinema passes these images in twelfths of a second, an improper speed for drawing or painting but which is at the same time the beauty of the moving image. In that sense one could say that animation is centripetal. Images are associated with speed, rhythm: it is “a visual art that is distinguished from painting by the fact that it develops in time like music and because the key point of the artistic does not consist, as in the pictures, in reducing a real or formal process to a moment, but precisely in the chronological development of the formal thing “, as Ruttman said in 1924.
In the vibration of the image, in its individuality, in the sensation of the spectator of not being apprehending the whole image, one perceives, parodying Barthes, the return of the permanent. This paradox, where cinema instantly transforms immortality, is the framework in which this master class will develop, showing how the animation contains in itself the various theories about time, the different temporalities and their characteristics. The architecture of time.
