PRESS

“It is a mesmerizing, meditative elegy that pays deferential respect to Ruíz’s poetic notations, building upon them, all the while bringing in the light and heat of California, describing its serenity, the senses and shapes of its landscape, its distances and explorations, its colours and sensuous materials - desert flowers and vegetation in particular - and of its bodies and its voices. She expresses a playful knowing of the properties of 16mm as a medium, of its tolerances and reactivity to light, its precariousness and examines the material quality of film like the material qualities of the body.” – On WORDS, PLANETS, Alex Hetherington, thisistomorrow.info

“There are artists who seem to live installed in a cramp, as if that small muscle contraction brought with it the imminence of the here and now. Laida Lertxundi (Bilbao, 1981), for example. She always stops at things that crumble: a door that falls, a machine that stops working, a voice that breaks. She has to do with their process of making films, disobeying any norm of narrative coherence. Emotion takes over scripts that never quite close. That is: the empty spaces once someone leaves the frame, the formal transparency, the sounds that overlap from one shot to another, the non-emotion of the non-characters or the out-of-field gestures that often communicate more than they could. say the words. Something like subtexts of stories waiting to be told. Sophisticated emotional cartographies with a lot of feeling of nostalgia.” – Bea Espejo, El País

BIO

Laida Lertxundi

Laida Lertxundi is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works in both Los Angeles and the Basque Country, in addition to her own production, she is also a teacher and coordinator of Filmmaking Studies at Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola.

Lertxundi’s films have screened in museums, festivals, and galleries, including most recently at, Locarno International Film Festival (2018), Toronto International Film Festival (2018, 2016), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2012, 2011), New York film Festival (2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018); Edinburgh International Film Festival (2014),. She has had solo screenings at MoMa, New York (2017),  Tate Modern, London (2016), Walker Art Center (2017); ICA, London (2016); White Chapel Gallery, London (2015); Glynn Vivian Gallery, Wales (2015); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2015); Museo de Arte Moderno, Medellin, Colombia (2015); LUX, London (2014); Kunstverein, Hamburg (2014); New York film Festival (2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018); Edinburgh International Film Festival (2014); BAM, Brooklyn (2014); MAK Schindler House, Los Angeles (2014); PS1 MoMA (2013); Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2013); Baltimore Museum of Art (2013); and Tate Modern, London (2011).

She has had solo exhibitions at LUX, London (2018), Tramway Glasgow (2018), Tabakalera, San Sebastian (2017); fluent, Santander, (2017); DA2, Salamanca (2015); Vdrome (2014); La Alhondiga, Bilbao (2014); and Marta Cervera (2013). Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Katonah Museum of Art, New York (2018); Galeria Cinematica Solar, Portugal, (2018), Joan, Los Angeles, (2017), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); the Bienal de La Habana, Cuba (2015); Wild Screen, Connemara, Ireland (2015); Frieze Projects, New York, (2014); LIAF, Biennial, Norway (2013); the Lyon Biennale (2013); and in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art (2012). Her monographic book Landscape Plus was published with Mousse Publishing ad fluent on 2019.

Stefan Ramstedt

Stefan Ramstedt works as a curator and writer. After studying cinema, he’s been writing about film for numerous publications and has curated a number of film screenings and series. In 2012, he co-founded Magasinet Walden, and works currently as curator at Cinemateket. His primary interests are the histories of documentary and experimental forms of cinema.