Avant-garde films in bed – An exciting video art festival with a casual screening concept has been taking place in Barcelona for 20 years

Imagine you come to a hotel, all the doors are open, a different film is playing in every room. You just go in, throw yourself on the freshly made bed and you're in the cinema. If you don't like the film, you go into the next room and see what's playing there. What sounds like a crazy dream is, roughly speaking, the concept of the Loop Fair, an idiosyncratic festival for video art in Barcelona. In November, the elegant Almanac Hotel is transformed for a few days into a mecca for experimental filmmaking. Works by renowned and up-and-coming video artists are presented on three floors - and sold by the galleries that represent them. The Loop Fair is also a market for film art. In the hotel corridors, potential buyers mingle with onlookers: art collectors, museum directors, festival scouts. In addition to the screenings, symposia on production conditions and exhibition opportunities for time-based media art are on the program. There are further Loop premieres, live performances and talks in the city's museums, galleries and cinemas. In the evenings, the scene meets for networking on the roof terrace or in the Fiske Bar at the harbor.

This year, around 40 films were presented in a hotel room setting, including documentaries and fiction, obscure research projects and danced refugee dramas, touchingly old-fashioned, hand-drawn animated films and feminist found-footage collages. The monitors also showed AI-generated, captivating, kaleidoscopic videos about Sumerian sacrificial rituals and apocalyptic visions of the future from the Israeli-Syrian border region created using CGI technology. In short, the offering was as dazzling, diverse and annoying as befits a contemporary film festival.

Most of the productions were no longer than 30 minutes, some films even much shorter.The German artist duo Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler only needs 9 minutes 20 in their video Open Call to reduce the self-optimization clichés of neoliberal consumer culture to absurdity. A woman in a silver suit encourages us with empty marketing slogans like an over-the-top lifestyle coach: "Hello, Hello, you unlimited you-you! Selfieselfyou, show you, explain you, define you, bring you, corporate you, bring the bring bring you – because we love love LOVE you, yes!" She is bathed in candy-colored light and stumbles herself at the end of her breathless self-love monologue, which was filmed in a single long take.

Olaf Stüber, founder of the Video Art at Midnight program in Berlin, brought the latest contribution to his VAM edition to Barcelona: Past Glory of Eternity by John Miller and Takuji Kogo. In it, the artists play with the idea of ​​AI-generated partners and let the virtual girlfriend become first seductive and then quite annoying.

Two floors up Jan Ijäs presented his film House of the Wickedest Man in the World, a suggestive bio-pic in Cinemascope format about the notorious British poet, painter and occultist Aleister Crowley. The Finnish filmmaker went in search of clues in Sicily, where Crowley lived out his dark genius cult in a villa above the sea in the 1920s. The camera circles around dilapidated houses, barren rocks and faded wall paintings while Crowley speaks to us from letters and diary entries. As a fun fact, Ijäs also tells us that the young Kenneth Anger also went on a voyage of discovery to Sicily in 1955 because he too wanted to make a film about Crowley's wild life.

For her found footage film Fainting Cordula Ditz ripped scenes from movies and YouTube videos in which women faint. Sometimes in dramatic Hollywood style, sometimes from a shaky viewer's perspective at a bodybuilding competition, you see women rolling their eyes and falling to the ground. In the rapidly changing circle, stars like Marilyn Monroe and Meryl Streep, but also unknown TV presenters, gymnasts, and beauty queens, falter. The fainting scenes are shown without commentary, accompanied only by wafting "relaxation music". This seems strange at first. But the endless fainting loop also exposes a sexist cliché: powerlessness as an eternal insecurity factor of the "weaker sex".

There is no thematic or formal link between the selected films. What connects the filmmakers is rather their self-image as border crossers between art and cinema tradition. Many show their films in galleries or museums and sell them in small editions to collectors and institutions. The Loop Fair was deliberately founded in 2003 by two video art friends, Emilio Álvarez and Carlos Durán, as a sales platform because films had previously led a rather shadowy existence on the art market. Although visual artists had long used time-based media as a means of expression, such works were rarely seen at relevant art fairs such as Art Basel, Frieze or Art Cologne. The decision to use a hotel as the venue, on the other hand, originally had very practical reasons. After all, a video fair requires many enclosed, soundproof rooms that would have had to be laboriously installed in conventional exhibition halls. The hotel concept has now become a trademark and cult in the Loop community. 

However, there are many of the participating artists who would otherwise show their films in traditional cinemas. For example, Gabriel Abrantes. His films are shown at the Berlinale, in Locarno and Cannes. With Diamantino He won the Grand Prix de la Semaine de la Critique there in 2018. He was now in Barcelona with the fictional short film Les Extraordinaires Mésadventures de la Jeune Fille de Pierre , an amusing and subtle story about an adventurous statue from the Louvre that joins the socialist protest movement in the streets of Paris. Gerard Ortín's documentaries about Agrologistics or Future Foods can be seen at the Hong Kong Film Festival and at the Tate Modern in London. At the Almanac Hotel he presented his latest food documentary Bliss Point, a fascinating, scary-beautiful look behind the scenes of global food distribution. 

Unlike many film festivals, you cannot apply for the Loop yourself. Participation is by invitation. The films are selected by an independent jury, which includes the Parisian collector couple Isabelle & Jean-Conrad Lemaître, the Turkish video art expert Haro Cumbusyan and the Dutch collector Renée Drake. Entry is free. You just have to register via the Loop-Website This also gives you access to the extensive online archive with the programs of previous editions as well as information about all the artists involved. And another argument for visiting the video festival: in Barcelona, ​​the average daily temperature in November is 20 degrees.