By Xisela Franco
Cinema Tours returns for its seventh edition as one of Play-Doc’s most distinctive experiences, inviting audiences to encounter cinema outside the theatre, in singular spaces across the city of Tui. Far from conventional screening, the programme creates an encounter between image, sound and architecture through live interventions conceived specifically for each site.
This edition unfolds across two stops that transform the perception of their surroundings and propose a shared and unrepeatable audiovisual experience. Both projects explore new narrative forms while expanding cinema into the performative, opening the way to an audiovisual language constructed in real time, in which the spectator becomes an active part of the work. If we want to identify where some of the most innovative forms of avant-garde cinema are currently being developed, in its intersection with contemporary art, the invited artists offer a particularly revealing example.
Krakatoa
We open Cinema Tours with Barcelona-based artist and filmmaker Carlos Casas, who presents an expanded cinema version of his film Krakatoa, inviting us into a powerful immersive experience that activates space through sound, image and vibration. Casas is an international reference at the intersection of cinema and contemporary art, and his work has been presented both at major auteur and avant-garde film festivals — such as the Venice Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Buenos Aires Film Festival, Mexico Film Festival and FID Marseille — and at contemporary art institutions where his audiovisual installations have been exhibited, including Tate Modern, Fondation Cartier, Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Hangar Bicocca (Milan), CCCB (Barcelona), GAM (Turin) and Bozar (Brussels).
Starting from the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883 — considered one of the most intense acoustic phenomena ever recorded — the work takes this event as a point of departure to explore both its physical dimension and its symbolic resonance. Beyond the historical event, Casas interprets it as a latent trace in the memory of the planet, inscribed in the atmosphere, in sound and in the collective imagination. Through a hybrid language combining documentary, speculative fiction and visual abstraction, Krakatoa constructs a perceptual experience that moves from contemplative calm to moments of great intensity. Sound, conceived here as an active material force, passes through the spectator’s body and exceeds the purely auditory.
Casas presents the work live together with sound designers and artists Nicolas Becker and Armand Lesecq, incorporating live foley, musical improvisation and real-time editing into the performance.
Variations for an Altarpiece
We then head on a night walk through Tui to the Church of San Domingos, where visual artist and creative coder Alba G. Corral awaits us. Born in Madrid and closely linked to the Catalan scene, Corral develops creative software and has applied this knowledge to audiovisual art in a distinctive way, affirming live cinema as a visual language in its own right. She is an internationally recognised figure in generative art and has a regular presence at festivals such as LEV, Primavera Sound, MUTEK, Eufònic, MIRA and Sónar, and has also presented work at key events in electronic music and digital art across Europe, Japan, Mexico and the United States.
For Play-Doc, the artist proposes an intervention on the central altarpiece of the Church of San Domingos, a Baroque work by the sculptor Antonio del Villar (1744), approaching it as a canvas on which to integrate her particular universe of abstraction and colour. Using tools such as Processing and Sonic Pi, Corral deploys a cosmos of organic forms, particles and luminous textures that emerge and evolve live. The piece establishes an encounter between the digital and the material, between the logic of the algorithm and the ornamental richness of the altarpiece, creating a contrast that brings different temporalities into relation. Her projector traces the surfaces, alters volumes and activates new meanings within the space. Created specifically for this context, the piece invites us to contemplate historical heritage from a contemporary perspective, in an open dialogue between tradition, technology and perception.
Two performances presented for the first time in Galicia — one of expanded cinema and the other of live cinema — which complement each other, exploring the cinematic experience from other places, in a night conceived to be experienced through the body, perception and space.
Notice: The first of the two performances, Krakatoa, includes strobe lighting, high-intensity sound and audiovisual effects that may affect sensitive individuals.
THURSDAY, APRIL 30 · 21:00 | SALA 3