Projects

Al Barzaj [between worlds]

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.

A study in time, key Unknown Frame Observatory concepts. At Desorg Punt Org and in the Santa Mònica de Barcelona 2023.

Far limits of an illusion.

"Running after a mirage is a permanent job without end"

End of work, magic life.

Presentation of the documentary "Between the book and the sword", a portrait of the Sikh community in the city of Barcelona and surroundings.

This video is part of the Educational Agreement of collaboration between the OVNI Archives and the Department of Anthropology of the University of Barcelona -  UAB , for the curricular external practices of the students, of the academic year 2022-2023.

Assaig sobre la ressonància entre els «oasis» que resisteixen a l'extensió del desert i les  constel·lacions de l'Observatori de Vídeo No Identificat (desorg punt org). — El Programa d'Estudis Independents (PEI) del MACBA, 2023-2024, «On són els oasis?», ens va convidar a fer una sessió a la fi d'abril 2023 com a projecte local d'arxiu, recerca i autoria. — El text a continuació és un fragment de la nostra intervenció.

The Opening of Vision

Notes for the script (November 2020)
Gabriel Villota Toyos

CRA'P in collaboration with The Unidentified Frame Observatory, presents a video-essay capable of arousing in the observer a critical as well as a contemplative thought.

Here is a memory or recollection of a research project on communication in the network age. It is not meant to summarise or capture it. Like any other memory, it is partial and distorted. It does not serve as a recipe, nor as a way forward, but to provoke ideas and inspire anyone who wants to open their own research on this or any of the topics.

Explorations at Dusk are eleven videographic sessions around the image-magic-artifice continuum, initially presented at the Santa Mònica Arts Center in Barcelona. Each session has been prepared by the Unidentified Video Observatory or in proximity collaborations. In a second phase, adaptations of the different projects will be published in the web context, at Desorg Dot Org.

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

We have embarked on a research permanent work in progress since 2020, that will look into the silence in which certain images alter a person’s life when they collide with it, triggering a “reworking” of the stories that this life tells itself.

CRA’P in collaboration with the Archives OVNI – Observatory of Video Not Identified, presents a second video programme with a subsequent discussion about 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
From Wednesday, 15 June 2022 to Friday, 17 June 2022
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).

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. A reflection on the violence embedded in any war – whether low or high intensity – in terms of the human loss, sorrow and suffering that it entails.  What cinema can do about all this, in facing these wars, whether there or in other places, which seem to be eternal?.

CRA’P in collaboration with the Archives OVNI – Observatory of Video Not Identified, presents a video program with a subsequent discussion about the limits that separate the existing from the void: between erosion of time and oblivion, sleep and wakefulness, presence and absence.

The OVNI Archives - Observatori de Vídeo No Identificat presents in collaboration with The Rojava Film Commune, a wandering video research project: Rewend.

The Purple Meridians is a joint project by three organisations in Spain, Italy and Turkey with the support of 2021 Eurimages Gender Equality Sponsorship.

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.

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

CRA’P in collaboration with the Archives OVNI – Unidentified Frame Observatory,  presents a video program with a subsequent discussion about the intermediate world: between the visible and the invisible, sleep and wakefulness, the states of trance.

Decolonizing Vision

The selection of videos presented in the Migrant Knowledge project puts forward alternative constructions of thought, analysis, and reflection concerning migrations. It does so through a plurality of views, experiences, memories, and stories that converge in a three-day program live at the Centre Civic Can Felipa, and a two-week online audio-visual menu, based on a selection of videos from the Archives OVNI.

CRA’P in collaboration with the Archives OVNI – Observatory of Video Not Identified, presents a video program with a subsequent discussion about the intermediate world: between the visible and the invisible, sleep and wakefulness ...

Winter’s End /OVNI 2020

WINTER'S END is a reading of the OVNI Archives that weaves together testimonies of the present and the recent past, as well as intuitions of that which exists outside of time. A videographic journey through the OVNI Archives that retrieves some of the most emblematic pieces from previous editions, incorporates new works, and brings to light videos that have never been shown. It is also a journey through the work of Toni Serra- Abu Ali, encompassing works that he made under his own name, others under a pseudonym, and some anonymously, rewriting archival images. A showcase of the collective, rhizomatic work of the OVNI community over the years in four sessions on the sleep and wakefulness of our days, on being adrift in times of maximum volatility, and on memory, beyond illusion.

WINTER'S END is held in memory of Toni Serra-Abu Ali, who met with death on 21 November 2019. Co-founder of OVNI and author of an important and extensive video oeuvre, the OVNI 2020 programme is guided by some of his works. 

Bergamo, the massacre that employers chose not to prevent.

The Italian region most devastated by Covid-19 is an industrial hub. It was never declared a red zone due to pressure from the employers association. The cost in human lives has been catastrophic. (Alba Sidera, Roma, 10/04/2020).

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.

Workshop with Scott Barley.

We enter into the night and darkness as the basis of vision.

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

Path of Return / OVNI 2018

visions, silence, darkness

And so this OVNI of fog takes us on a journey through the middle world, the experience of physical death and of the deaths of the ego.

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 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.

"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".

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.

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 / 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 [ 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.

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: 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 / 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 / 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: 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: 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 _ 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 / 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.

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 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.

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.

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/ 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 / 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 / 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.

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.

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.

OVNI - La 12 Visual - Salón Autónomo - Conservas

La 12 Visual / Second Independent Video Show

Vídeo art. Independent Documentary.

La 12 Visual / First Independent Video Show