EXPANDED HOME CINEMA. POETICS AND POLITICS OF THE MOVING IMAGE
Aula Magna da FBAUP
Quarta-feira, 18 de Novembro de 2026, às 17.00
We could define this encounter as a political and poetic miracle, and we will call it Expanded Home Cinema.
The proposal stems from three fundamental questions: what happens when cinema ceases to be just a film and becomes a spatial, physical, and temporal experience? What happens when two worlds meet? What happens when personal memory is transformed into collective memory?
This performative talk proposes an encounter between private memory and public space. Using found footage as raw material—that corpus of anonymous, family, and domestic films that come from the intimate sphere—to intervene in them, expand them, and turn them into a collective experience that recontextualizes and explores all the possible and impossible capabilities of the cinematographic device.
Here, the screen ceases to be a border. The memory is no longer contemplated: it is inhabited. The image abandons its place as an object to become space, atmosphere, and event. The viewer ceases to be in front of the film to enter it and actively participate in the construction of the image. Cinema thus becomes a walkable sculpture of light.
Expanded Home Cinema proposes a dialogue between the conceptualization that Gene Youngblood set forth in his book Expanded Cinema, where he declared that cinema was no longer a medium, but a state of consciousness, and the poetics of Jonas Mekas’s cinema, where he vindicates the immortality of the human gesture, the value of the everyday, the imperfect, and the ephemeral.
By expanding home movies, we strip memory of its individualistic origin to turn it into collective memory. The past ceases to be a representation to become a present event, a shared ritual.
Expanded home cinema is, in short, a way of activating memory and returning it to the community. A small poetic crack against the tyranny of immediacy: a cinema of presents, made of fragments, bodies, light, and time. A community magic lantern where memory ceases to be something looked at to become something that happens.
The research of AA++ is situated precisely in that intermediate territory in which cinema dialogues with the visual arts, installation, performance, and audiovisual experimentation. Their work recovers cinematographic technologies and materials not from a nostalgic perspective, but as tools capable of producing new forms of perception and relationship with the image.
Based on different experiences and works carried out by filmmakers, artists, and performers such as Stan VanDerBeek, José Val del Omar, Valie Export, Malcolm Le Grice, Anthony McCall, Peter Forgacs, or Bill Morrison, we will delve into the different forms that cinema has adopted as a artist material and a tool for experimentation. Special attention will be paid to the possibilities offered by photochemical formats, film manipulation, and live projection, as well as the relationships established between image, space, and viewer.
The talk will include an Expanded Home Cinema film performance, carried out by the collective AA++, Ana Domínguez, and Ángel Rueda, where they will invite the attending audience to participate in the ritual of this collective, poetic, and deeply political experience.
AA++ is a creation laboratory formed by Ana Domínguez and Ángel Rueda, two artists whose practice develops around the investigation of the possibilities of cinema beyond the screen and the conventional modes of cinematographic exhibition.
Their work explores the relationships between image, light, space, time, and perception, recovering the physical and performative dimension of the cinematographic device. Through projectors, 16 mm and Super 8 film, multiple projection systems, interventions on filmic material, and actions carried out in real time, AA++ understands projection not only as a medium to show a film, but as a space for creation and as an event in itself where visual arts and performance coexist.
Ana Domínguez, coming from the field of visual arts and with experience in art direction, scenography, and filmmaking, progressively joined this universe of research. Her work as an artist and filmmaker includes the feature film Os fillos da vide, for which she was the director and screenwriter; the film had an extensive run in international festivals and won the award for best Galician film in 2018 at the MICE in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Ángel Rueda develops his activity as an artist, filmmaker, researcher, and curator around the experimental possibilities of the cinematographic medium and, especially, photochemical formats and forms of live cinema.
Among his first projects is Lili Films, an initiative from which he began to investigate the possibilities of cinema in real time, performance, and the use of analog cinematographic materials. During this period, he made more than twenty appropriation and performance pieces, among which Bendita Calle (2005) stands out, shot entirely in Super 8, where he recreates the Kino-Pravda ideology of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov.
In 2010, both launched the (S8) Mostra Internacional de Cinema Periférico de A Coruña, a project dedicated to cinematographic experimentation, analog formats, and audiovisual practices situated on the margins of conventional cinema. Since then, both have served as co-directors of the Mostra, which has become a space of reference for research, exhibition, and encounters around experimental cinema and contemporary practices on photochemical support.
As AA++, their artistic work has been presented in different national and international contexts. Among their proposals are “La Mecánica de la Luz” or “Hay cosas de las que no se puede hablar, pero existen y sólo se pueden mostrar”, an expanded home cinema experience based on anonymous images shot in Super 8 and 16 mm, worked through multiple projection techniques and live film collage.
