Archive Interpretations 2025

The unsystematic nature of memory.

CONTEXT PROTOCOL

Lying on deep surfaces is not lying.

Times to Come

Nobody could see beyond.
Santa Mònica series 2025.

SHINE OF A PERFECT SPHERE

Running after a mirage is a permanent job without end.

WAR, INSUBMISSION, ART

Project in residency of Falconetti Peña at the Observatory

STATES OF PASSAGE

A video-essay by Alessandro Quaranta and Toni Cots,  in collaboration with CRA’P.

Immersion in the labyrinth of Daídalos

Jiser, in collaboration with the Unidentified Video Observatory, presents “Immersion into the labyrinth of Daídalos”, public program of the exhibition Daídalos / Δαίδαλος at the Port of Tarragona, in the framework of the Festival Internacional de Fotografia SCAN  of Tarragona.

ILLUSORY MOTION

Static images are presented to the human visual system in a way that creates the illusion of movement.
Santa Mònica series 2024.

Crossing Narratives

Care, hospitality, welcome: Trade union and women cultural workers.

TANGIER INTERZONE

During the “INTERZONE” period in Tangier, the East met the West, in a debacle of absolute incomprehension.

the black anti sun

The Black Antisol. Silence in the Awakening of the Worlds & Vincent Moon.

HEAVEN IS ALIVE

"Even if there were nothing more for us than earthly life, even if the instant of death brought us nothing new, the infinite superabundance of divine mercy is already secretly present, here, in all its completeness." Simone Weil, Waiting for God.

VISIONS OF AN EXPANDED TIME

Scott Barley and  Alessandro Quaranta, about the transmitted and evoked presences through vital experiences in symbiosis with nature and its cycles.

NON-SUBMISSIVE LANDSCAPES

Workshop with the Bornlab Community Studies Group

ARCHIVE READINGS 2023

A study in time, key Unknown Frame Observatory concepts.
Santa Mònica series 2023.

The Purple Meridians III

Geographical and symbolic coordinates, and also the name of this project created in 2021 by three organizations based in three European cities: Streeen.org (Turin), Observatori de Vídeo No Identificat (Barcelona), and Rosa Kadın Derneği (Diyarbakir).

Light / Vibration

Un vídeo-assaig capaç de suscitar en l'observador un pensament crític alhora que contemplatiu.

Memory and Resilence

The limits that separate reason from the human condition, carrying out an incursion into the confines of reality and a reflection on the violence inherent in any war – whether of low or high intensity – that is, the losses, pain and human suffering, which they entail.

Cv_23

End of work, magic life.

Entre el libro y la espada

A portrait of the Sikh community in the city of Barcelona and surroundings.

Unidentified Video Observatory Constellations

Ensayo sobre la resonancia entre los «oasis» que resisten a la extensión del desierto y las constelaciones del Observatorio de Vídeo No Identificado - Desorg punto Org.

The Opening of Vision

Notes for the script.
Gabriel Villota Toyos

Enredados

About communication in the networking age.

TRANS_FORM

Kumbah Mela, with works by Ira Cohen and Alberto Martos.

Explorations at Dusk

Image-magic-artifice continuum.
Santa Mònica series 2022.

Silence in the Awakening of the Worlds

If a world awakens among us, we do not remain the same.

Dreaminess 2

The limits that separate the existing from the void: between erosion of time and oblivion, sleep and wakefulness, presence and absence, solitude and the limits of being.

The Purple Meridians II

The Purple Meridians are geographic as well as symbolic coordinates, and also the name of a joint project created in 2021 by three organisations based in three European cities: Observatori de Vídeo No Identificat (Barcelona) Streeen.org (Turin) and Rosa Kadın Derneği (Diyarbakır).

Territories of the Soul

A dialogue with the filmmaker Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd and the videomaker Alessandro Quaranta, around the concept of lost territories - physical and existential - for and because of which communities resist, fight or flee: the Saharawis, the Armenians and the Yezidis.

Dreaminess 1

About the limits that separate the existing from the void: between erosion of time and oblivion, sleep and wakefulness, presence and absence.

REWEND

In collaboration with The Rojava Film Commune, a wandering video research project.

The Purple Meridians

Five meridians are drawn on the map between Barcelona (Spain) and Turin (Italy). A person walking from Turin to Diyarbakır (Turkey) would cross thirty-five more. Three cities and countries distant in space yet sharing the desire for a fairer distribution of opportunities for women and non-binary people in the audiovisual and film industry.

Archive Readings 2020-2021

Annotations from the Unidentified Frame Observatory Archive - Desorg Dot Org.

Between Worlds *2

About the intermediate world: between the visible and the invisible, sleep and wakefulness, the states of trance.

Migrant Knowledge

Alternative constructions of thought, analysis, and reflection concerning migrations. It does so through a plurality of views, experiences, memories, and stories that converge.

Between Worlds *1

About the intermediate world: between the visible and the invisible, sleep and wakefulness.

Archive 1994-2020

1994-2020 Archive, Observatory of Non Identified Video. Online Access

Winter’s End

In memory of Toni Serra-Abu Ali, who met with death on 21 November 2019. Co-founder of OVNI and author.

2020 - Yeswework

They want us to continue with our previous lives. The do it using a pincer strategy: first they spread fear and then they appeal for us to work "together". But it is the people who go to work who risk their lives, for inadequate salaries, while those at the top share the profits among themselves. What we have to do now is imagine other forms to live and rise above fear.

Toni Serra  *)  Abu Ali

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep
You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep
People are going back and forth across the doorsill, where the two worlds touch
The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep

Mohammad Rūmī.

Around Darkness

Workshop with Scott Barley. Darkness as the basis of vision.

His Name Was Not Frankenstein

A reading sequence by sequence of Dr. Frankenstein 1931, conducted by Falconetti Peña.

Path of Return

Visions, silence, darkness.

2017 - The Unseen Workshop

A workshop with Toni Serra Abu Ali

From forced invisibility to permanent exhibition in the panopticon. The image as a veil. Tunnels of reality. The reality of the dream. Crossing the other side. On contemplation. The one and the multiple.

Une Jeunesse Allemande

Une Jeunesse Allemande by Jean-Gabriel Périot, tells the history of the Rote Armee Fraktion - RAF (or Red Army Faction, a German revolutionary terrorist group from the 1970s founded notably by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof) as well as the images generated by this story. The film is entirely produced by editing preexisting visual and sound archives and aims to question viewers on the significance of this revolutionary movement during its time, as well as its resonance for today’s society.

Where is my tribe?

"Loneliness is on the rise. "Mainstream discourse hides the fact that the ‘normal’ situation of a 40-hour working week, plus daycare, plus grandma for tricky times, does not just leave room for improvement, it is downright unacceptable.” Carolina del Olmo.

Erik Gandini documentary, "The Swedish Theory of Love" and talk / debate with Carolina Del Olmo, author of the book "Where is my tribe".

The right time of revolution

Andrea Cavalletti and Marcello Tarì, workshop about a political genealogy of the impeachment as well as everything that is at stake in determining the right time for the revolution.

The Other City

Documentaries and pieces of video art provide multiple readings of the concept of the city and offer complex, antagonistic insights into different Mediterranean metropolises.

Right to Move

Right to move / Llibertat de Moviment. De fronteres internes i externes a col·laboracions, línies de fuga i perspectives". Del 23 al 26 de maig de 2016 al Goethe-Institut Barcelona. El programa ens apropa a diferents aspectes de la migració a través de les intervencions i debats protagonitzats per persones i col·lectius que treballen contra la vulneració dels drets de les persones migrants, la discriminació i el racisme.

The Center as the Border. Zones of Being and not Being

The Center as the Border. Zones of Being and not Being [ migra and coloniality ] / OVNI 2016

The border has a tendency to spread: it explodes into outsourcing to third countries, and implodes as domestic borders, control devices, detentions and disappearances...; in other words, it tends to occupy the entire system, becoming centre. In the shadows of the border-as-system, where control is out of control, the prototype of a totalitarian society is assembled.

Concerning Violence /  Le Grand Jihad /  Le Jour a Vaincu la Nuit

Observatory Archives: a tool / OVNI 2015

OVNI opens up public access to the Intranet of the Observatory Archives, founded in 1993. To launch this new phase, we will screen a programme of videos that establish the two poles of this project, which span from social critique at one end, to personal exploration at the other. Concerning Violence by Göran Hugo Olsson with texts by Frantz Fanon,  Le Grand Jihad by Vincent Moon, a ritual around memory, and Le Jour a Vaincu la nuit, by Jean-Gabriel Périot,  around dreams.

in Limbo

In Limbo: falling and flying / OVNI 2014

Limbo (Del Lat. Limbus): world between the living and the dead / storage space where de deleted archives are sent / a tale by Aldous Huxley.

Oblivion

Oblivion / OVNI 2012

This program in the form of an essay aims to shed light on some of the more disturbing aspects of contemporary life. Specifically, it looks at experiences involving conflict with power and at the imminent arrival of an even greater confrontation. A clash that exceeds the political realm and expands towards the notion of civilisation itself, and that seems to emanate from a source within the inner life of human beings.

We convey this vision through a programme with a dual core: La Commune by Peter Watkins, and The Mahabharata by Peter Brook, which we have contextualised with a series of documentaries and other documents that show contemporary expressions of the central theme.

Dis_Reality

Dis_Reality / OVNI 2011

"You are asleep, and your vision is a dream; all you see is an illusion.”
Mahmud Shabistari, The Secret Garden. Persia, 18th century.

OVNI disReality aims to reflect upon different phenomena of the critique of reality, their repercussions and the horizons that they illuminate, or recall. Extremely heterogeneous traditions and forms of experience radically question not only the concept of reality, but the very experience of the real.

Rhizomes

Rhizomes: liberated spaces / OVNI 2009

OVNI Rhizomes lays bare the subterranean, rhizomatic points of contact between worlds and experiences that seem very different from each other. The remembered image is that of a rhizome (1), or rhizomes, it doesn't matter which because it is both at once, the singular and plural do not affect it. We screen videos like visions that connect and interrelate these states and realities, producing rhizome in space, but also in time, given that the first two principles of the rhizome are connection and heterogeneity: any of its points can and must be connected to anything else. This is not the case with trees and roots, which always fix a point, a particular order.

Exodus

Exodus: The Margins of the Empire / OVNI 2008

"Open your eyes and look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living? (...) So we gonna walk, alright, through the roads of creation. We're the generation (Tell my why) trod through great tribulation". Exodus, Bob Marley

The videos screened at OVNI 2008 will offer an initial reflection on the “marginal” and the desire to cross margins, on forms of personal or collective exodus – whether physical or as a state of mind. They include perspectives on different forms of marginalization and exploitation which lie directly under the oppressive vertical force of power, such as workers in Chinese export factories or clandestine Palestinian day workers in Israel. And perspectives on armed conflict zones that go beyond the “propaganda-counter propaganda” dialectic: in South America, Chechnya, Lebanon, Iraq, Darfur, Afghanistan...

The Colonial Dream

The Colonial Dream _ Autonomous Zones / OVNI 2006

A program of videos, independent documentaries and media archaeology dealing with colonialism and its mutations in the global age.

Colonialism and Eurocentrism are often discussed as though they were things of the past, fortunately overcome. But in life under globalisation, the reality seems to be just the opposite: the occupation and destruction of other worlds and cultures, systematic exploitation of their resources... and also aggressions at the local level, real-estate violence, colonial tourism, migra. Autonomy and no-zones: other ways of perceiving and creating community-based external realities and subjective inner ones. Autonomous ways of living and thinking, zones without limits, no-zones.

Resistances

Resistances / OVNI 2005

The word resistance is starting to gain currency in places and cultures all over the world, joining those that have never stopped practicing it. Resistance implies negation, the blocking of a process or power, but it also contains an affirmation: that there are other ways of doing, thinking, living. Minorities and majorities marginalized in their own land practice it in various active and passive ways. Today, this practice is bringing together very diverse cultures and peoples, some totally unconnected, that are starting to become aware of each other, to talk of each other amongst themselves in this struggle.

In the 18th Century, the andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi wrote: " freedom unites us, unity frees us ", a statement that can me read on many levels, one which could be: Freedom unites us as free women, men and communities, and this unity frees us.

2003 / 2005 / 2006 / 2009 - TransArab

TransArab is about the richness and complexity of reflections, about countries with an Arabic culture through video, a hybrid medium which allows for autonomous production, independent of major commercial or institutional productions... and which, by it’s nature, is much more closely linked to social, community and subjective microcosms than to “satellite” vision and “audiovisual fastfood”.

POST 9-11

POST 09-11 / OVNI 2003

The screenings for this edition will be based on a selection from the 150 audiovisual documents that have been added to the Observatory Archives over the last 18 months. Together, this material reflects some of the most serious issues of our time, using different media and languages such as video art, independent documentary, media archaeology....to reflect the process of Globalisation and the Resistance it generates.

The Observatory Archives

Presentation of the Observatory Archives / OVNI 2002

OVNI has permanently acquired the rights for the public consultation in the archive of some 420 works. These archives have an intentional and thematic character: to enable a critique of contemporary culture and society based precisely on the language that most characterizes it, using various strategies: video art, independent documentary, archeology of the mass media.

The Archives cover a huge range of works that are very different from one another, but share a commitment to freedom of expression and reflect on our individual and collective fears and pleasures. Together, they offer a multifaceted view, thousands of tiny eyes that probe and explore our world and announce other possible worlds. It is a discourse that above all values heterogeneity, plurality, contradiction and subjectivity, an antidote to the cloning and repetition of the current corporate mass media.

1999-2001 / 2005 - Babylon Archives

www.gov.mil.biz. 
An early www media Archaeology project. 

Who We Are.

We are a pioneering company, we solve the toughest problems in space, aeronautics, defense and cyberspace to meet the ever evolving needs of our customers worldwide. Our 90,000 employees are Defining Possible every day using science, technology and engineering to create and deliver advanced systems, products and services.

COMMUNITIES

COMMUNITIES/ OVNI 2000

OVNI 2000 brings toughener a series of works which we hope may serve as a plural and multifaceted reflection on the notion of COMMUNITY, understood not as ideal, a closed and defined paradigm, but as a reality: spaces for social, anthropological, cultural and emotional relationships where we already find ourselves, irrespective of the acceptance, participation or conflict we develop within tem.

GLOBALIZATION

GLOBALIZATION / OVNI 1999

Memory / Collective fiction _ Dreams / Personal Memories  _  Standards and archetypes and individual irreducibility  _  Media paranoia and stories of schizophrenia _ Social passions and love stories _ The "American dream" /  The "European dream" _ Temporary Autonomous Zones and Other Worlds.

IDENTITY vs MEDIA

IDENTITY vs MEDIA / 4th Independent Vídeo Show & Interactive Phenomena / OVNI 1997

Each of the programs that make up the 4MVI & FIN works as a route that aims to transport the viewer's state of mind and interest through a series of mental and emotional landscapes, in the manner of rites or trips, where each part of the route affects and alters the other. In this way, each program goes through fundamentally different works, following a flow that does not exclude contradiction or paradox, that reads meaning above concrete meanings.

Identity _ Noche Oscura del Alma _ William Burroughs _ Steven Reinke _ Joe Gibbons _ La Société du Spectacle _ Guy Debord _ Rick Prelinger Archives.

MACBA 1996-1998

 

From 1996 to 1998, the Unidentified Video Observatory curated sixteen monthly and thematic video sessions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, MACBA. The MACBA Sessions were crucial for the consolidation of the project and, as an essential part of this initiative, the Observatory also organized and proposed the acquisition of a selection of video titles to start the first video library of the Museum.

 

Desorg Dot Org

MEDIA DIGEST

MEDIA DIGEST / 3rd MVI - Independent Vídeo Show / La 12 Visual / OVNI

In the 3rd MVI, this approach has led us to focus on two key issues that often intersect: Identity and Mass Media. An idea of identity not only influenced by a conceptual relationship with others and with the media, but also by inner experience – that non-transferable aspect of our individual journey – in a shifting context in which the real expands to embrace the media and the lived experience of everyday technology.

THE RAINBOW IS YOURS _ DEMONTAGE encore. _ KABELKUNST _ FLOPPY FOREVER _ ZONA ABIERTA.

1994 / 1995 - Oigo Voces

OVNI - La 12 Visual - Salón Autónomo - Conservas

La 12 Visual

La 12 Visual / Second Independent Video Show

Vídeo art. Independent Documentary.

La 12 Visual

La 12 Visual / First Independent Video Show