All are welcome to a screening of four short films by Peruvian artist, Rafael Hastings, The Unconditioned Unconcealment [4 Short Films On The Act Of Disappearing] from 1974, Sunday 16th June at 3 p.m. in Gerðarsafn.
The event is co-hosted by Hugo Llanes, artist and cultural facilitator and is a part of Komd’inn event programming.
After the screening, a video about Hastings work and Mariategui’s research will be presented.
Details:
Rafael Hastings The Unconditioned Unconcealment [4 Short Films On The Act Of Disappearing]
The Island of the Immortals (A Legend from the Time of Ho-Chi), Rafael Hastings
Unconditioned Unhiding and/or An Approximation of the Act of Disappearing, Rafael Hastings
Legend of Two Gardens (From an Anonymous Document Collected by Octavio Paz), Rafael Hastings
The Four Celestial Poles (From a Stone Testimony filmed in Sechín, Casma, Peru), Rafael Hastings
35 mm, Colour, 1974, 31 min. ENG SUB.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zRfVW_A97k
Rafael Hastings (1945-2020), was a Peruvian multidisciplinary artist whose films operated as a disruptive force in Latin American cinematography. The experimental style and the fusion of artistic elements through the linking of diverse practices are part of his uniqueness.
The films that compose The Unconditioned Unconcealment [4 Short Films On The Fact Of Disappearing] (1974) were based on the work of Fernando Llosa Porras, who studied an ancient Chinese myth that narrates the beginning of a new era in symbolic terms. Llosa Porras identified that the essence of this legend bore a striking resemblance to the mythologies of the cultures of the Andes and Mesoamerica, where the same basic elements exist: chaos or barbarism; the search for the reestablishment of a lost balance by a mythical solar-lunar couple and the return to a primordial state through a process of transformation.
Hastings’ short films are based on Llosa Porras’ study and poetically depict the influence of oriental thought in the first cultures of Ancient Peru.
The four short films were screened in 1976 in Lima at the Cine Roma to an audience of mostly friends and were later shown in New York. In Peru, their exhibition was denied due to the inclusion of nudity. It was then that the producer, Juan Barandiarían, decided to make versions that could circulate commercially against the author’s wish. However, as time went by, both the copies of these versions and Hastings’ copy were lost.
After being lost for 50 years, it took the Peruvian curator José-Carlos Mariátegui nearly 2 decades of research and retracing the places around the world where it was shown to find it, against all odds, in the Spanish Cinematheque in 2021. This happened a few months after Hastings’ passing in 2020.
The rescue, restoration, and national and international promotion of Rafael Hastings’ filmography aims to recognize the value of his work and its contribution to the history of the moving image in Peru and Latin America. The digitalization, cataloging and preservation were possible thanks to the Audiovisual Preservation Stimulus of the year 2021 of the Ministry of Culture of Peru.
