Thrilled to hear that Flight has been selected for Helios Sun Poetry Film Festival in Mexico City. It is on from the 9th-15th December and should be a wonderful event. I am hoping to go at some point in the future... It makes a great follow on from FOTOGENIA. They say:'Helios Sun Poetry Film Festival aims to explore the boundaries between cinema, visual arts and poetry as hybrid forms of creative expression. ...We believe that moving images are a form of poetic writing that allow us to understand and elaborate expanded language codes, symbols and imaginary through which we can connect with people.' Absolutely. Have a great event. Felicitaciones y Abrazo!!!
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Exciting videopoetry curation by Alejandro Thornton at avant-garde Poetics of Resistance, POSVERSO Biennial Argentina, 6 December.  Artists include: Oskar Fischinger (Alemania), Walter Ruttmann (Alemania), Augusto de Campos (Brasil), Decio Pignatari (Brasil), Tom Konyves (Canadá), Montenegro-Fischer (UK-Chile), Sarah Tremlett with Lucy English(UK), Tulio Restrepo (Colombia), Tatiana Gaviola (Chile), Belén Gache, Gonzalo Aguilar (author of leading publication on Argentinian Cinema), Ivana Vollaro, Rubén Grau, Ro Barragán, Rosa Gravino, Paula Pellejero, Facundo Díaz y Alejandro Thornton amongst others’. Over the moon to be in such stellar company with Solstice Sol Invictus.
 
Really a very exciting collection of works, and I wish I could be there to see a rare example of Walter Ruttmann’s abstract cinematic films. I am honoured that my poetry film Solstice Sol Invictus has been included in this really impressive group and particularly with the legendary artist Augusto de Campos. I created the concept (words, visuals, sound) of the film for Lucy English’s The Book of Hours project, with the theme of course registering the mediaeval and reflective, temporal feel of the original Books of Hours, but with the sun and its passage through the year as a central theme bringing – hope, faith and regeneration. I came up with the (verbal, visual and sound) concept and wrote the first four verses and Lucy the second.
 
I also made another poetry film for this project (a natural pair) entitled Summer Solstice (with old 35 mm footage of a California beach). Solstice Sol Invictus effectively uses the screen as a moving canvas, showing the changes in light as the sun passes through the seasons. I also have referenced earlier painters and their solar depictions and in the latest version I have included these at the end.
 
​Historical paintings that influenced this work include: Max Ernst’s Black Sun 1927–8; Vincent Van Gogh’s Sower with Setting Sun (1888); Ambassador of Autumn, 1922 by Paul Klee, which has haunted me with its tonal, horizontal gradations, also influencing the dynamic structure of Mr Sky, 2018, (another poetry film with Lucy English) and a later abstract landscape Spiral Motif in Green, Violet, Blue and Gold: The Coast of the Inland Sea, 1950 by British artist Victor Pasmore (1908–98).

POSVERSO on till 20th December with many more events.
https://posversobienal.com.ar/
 
https://liberatedwords.com/2024/11/30/poetics-of-resistance-posverso-biennial-videopoetry-curation-by-alejandro-thornton/

SO THRILLED that Flight has been included in the major film festival FOTOGENIA, Mexico City this year. I am particularly please since it is both my (autobiographical) poem and film.
 
Flight represents a new direction in my work. It is a very personal poem and poetry film about my childhood relationship with my mother, who suffered depression, though I didn’t know it at the time. We rattled around in a large, cold house – my father’s dream, bought at auction – but there were parts she never visited in her entire life. I cleaned and looked after the house and garden to help her, from the age of five.

​The visual imagery also includes samples of my neo-expressionist paintings and ‘Floor’ carpet, floor and dust sculpture from the 1980s. The poem is also inspired by an ekphrastic poem I wrote about Lanyon’s work ‘The Last Green Mile’ (Transitional : Otter Gallery Anthology, Chichester University, 2015). ‘Flight’ is from the forthcoming commissioned collection –  The Unexhibited, available in 2025.

FOTOGENIA runs from November 21st to the 30th – 9 days, 15 themed screenings, online and performances!! Flight is in Programme 2.  See Liberated Words for a very brief overview of selected performance-based poetry films, and short films including Chantal Caron, Marissa Brown, Helmie Stil, Ana Pantic, Paula Alves, Coraline Claude, and Mark Niehus, Martin Gerigk, David Belotti, Fernando Mol and Ale Nuño.
https://liberatedwords.com/2024/11/16/fotogenia-6-nine-glorious-days-of-wonder-talent-and-imagination-in-mexico-city/
 

https://www.fotogeniafilmfestival.org/

Thursday 14th November at the Municipal Museum in Albacete
​UPDATE - Unfortunately I have decided to cancel my trip to the amazing Maldito festival this year due to the flash flooding in SE Spain. I was going to be going to other parts before the festival and due to health related issues I feel it better not to go. The event will happen though, so all is not lost.  Here is what I was going to be showing, for the record!
... a small retrospective of my own video poems at leading avant-garde video poetry festival Maldito, this year. Paintings often inspire my work, as well as collaborating with both of my daughters, who are both in different areas of performance. My work with authorial poetry films, or subjective poetry films that I have conceived through both poems and audiovisual material has culminated in my autobiographical poetry collection Unexhibited (2025) and the poetry film Flight is the prologue to that work. Flight combines a childhood with a mother suffering from depression, alongside drone footage of the Cornish coast.

Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow tour
... presenting the bilingual poetry anthology with QR link to poetry films – Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow  and also showing films from the project. The book has toured around the world throughout 2024 and I am particularly excited to be at Maldito as the year ends.
 
‘Described as an innovative and unique project, Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow is a bilingual (English and Spanish) poetry book with a QR link to a screening of 17 poetry films made from poems. An international reference work, the first of its kind in this field, which celebrates both translation and transmedia, showcasing a wide variety of examples of the art of poetry cinema and its adaptation to the screen.’

www.malditofestival.com

So happy that Flight has been accepted for OBheal in Cork this year!!! As I have said it is a very personal poem about my isolated childhood where my mother suffered depression, and I was lucky to make the connection to the visual imagery I had been given of a drone flight along the Cornish coast. Also, my admiration for the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon who made paintings from the view from his glider, and also died following a gliding accident. I wrote a poem about one of his paintings ‘The Last Green Mile’  (Transitional : Otter Gallery Anthology, Chichester University, 2015). With grateful thanks to the poet Linda Cleary, director of the Home (Dis)Place(d) Project, Women in Word Festival, 2024 Hypatia Trust, Cornwall, UK. She helped inspire the piece. Flight is from the commissioned poetry collection Unexhibited (2025). Within the visuals lie my early artwork - FLOOR sculpture with dust and carpet, and extracts of neo expressionist paintings (1980s) and also of Peter Lanyon's abstract paintings, too. I would like to add that the translation took some doing, if you look at the complex meaning behind the words you will see that my translator Camilo Bosso did a fantastic job. But it took a few goes!!

Thrilled that FLIGHT has been selected for Aotearoa Festival in Wellington, New Zealand 20-21November. You can also see the film on my channel on YouTube or Vimeo and the next post. As it was a much more personal poem and film about my childhood I am really touched that it is being shown. The commissioned collection Unexhibited is out in 2025. THANK YOU so much 😊