The must-sees of the new edition of the Loop video art fair

BarcelonaClimate change is taking its toll on the Ebro Delta: sea levels are rising and subsidence problems, meaning land sinking, have been detected, threatening the rice paddies. "The reservoirs of Ribarroja, Mequinenza, Flix, and the fifty other reservoirs along the river retain the sediment, which is the lifeblood of the delta. If the lifeblood doesn't flow, if it's cut off, you'll eventually die," says one of the characters in the video by artist Anna Moreno. Fable 99. "There's nothing under the rocks, the delta has nothing fixed below. We are, so to speak, floating. There is a submerged delta that supports the entire visible part of the delta," says another of the characters. Fable 99 It can be seen from Tuesday until Saturday at the new edition of the Loop video art fair, held, as usual, at the Almanac Barcelona hotel. "The Delta is like a testing ground for everything that's going to happen," warns Anna Moreno, who is represented by the House of Chappaz gallery.

Moreno began her research in the Ebro Delta four years ago, and during this time she has come into contact with different local figures, most notably Yary, who in the film sings a fable at the Tower of San Juan, an emblematic ruin of the Delta and "a testament to a receding landscape," as the artist herself stated in the presentation of the work. The "99" in the title refers to the fact that the video is the prelude to a science fiction film set in 2099 that will be released in the spring. "Due to the lack of defenses, the Delta has been undone by climate change, and the government hasn't helped us." “Now we all go by boat, the sea has swallowed everything,” laments Yary, while archival footage of traditional houses and blue crabs, considered an invasive species, plays on screen.

This edition features 38 galleries, and the video art works on display form a large mosaic of the global problems that concern the artists. Environmental issues reappear in Broken rhythm, by Erkan Özgen (ZINK gallery), where you can see half a dozen women gleaning waste in a huge landfill and turning it into a kind of instrument, while one dengbêjA male narrator-singer performs a story of love and loss. The artist's aim, he says, is "to make visible the ecological destruction caused by excessive consumption and to unveil the hidden stories embedded in waste."

In contrast, Zhang Xu Zhan (Project Fulfill Art Space gallery) addresses climate change with humor: Termite feeding show It shows human-sized termites causing a power outage because they've run out of wood and have to eat the cables. There's also humor in Glenda León's video. Political world (Senda Gallery): The artist asked the AI what the world would look like if everything moved from left to right or right to left to critique "the current absurd polarization." The poor AI didn't grasp the irony and provided him with an extravagant catalog of images with these movements.

Rampant consumerism also wreaks havoc on people: the protagonists of the mockumentary Automatic rejectionSalvatore Vitale's video (Ncontemporary Gallery) features freelancers working in the app industry in South Africa who have become a kind of digital slave. This video is part of a project titled Death by GPSThis is a reference to the fact that if these workers are unreachable, they don't receive orders. Vitale recreates a revolution by some of these workers.

Indigenous Hope

In turbulent times like these, artists often turn to ancestral cultures and knowledge to find alternatives. Obsidian Dream (Ultraviolet Projects gallery) you can see the Mayan artist Kaqchikel Edgar Calel performed a ritual, draped in a jaguar skin, inside the rationalist building of the São Paulo Biennial to pay homage to his ancestors. "This ancestral cosmology is valid within the discourse of contemporary art. Edgar Calel was an artist long before the Western concept of art arrived," states gallery owner Cristina Rodríguez. "The fact that an Indigenous artist is part of the art circuit also suggests that this ancestral cosmology is part of contemporary art. It's like a claim; he offers this ancestral wisdom. It's not just that Westerners are entitled to transmit their ideas and knowledge," she explains. In the video Earth rumblingThe queer multidisciplinary artist Elyla evokes the Masaya volcano, in a performance with which he asserts his dissent and, at the same time, honors his ancestors.

The enduring relationship between painting and video art is curious: A RebellionsGabriela Golder (Rolf Art gallery) recreates the lithograph by the artist Guillermo Facio Hebequer The International(1935) with a group of workers expelled from a factory who created a street theater company. "Gabriela revisits the documents and gives them substance," says the gallery. The video is in slow motion, allowing viewers to observe the gestures of each character. At the Rocío Santa Cruz gallery, Dionís Escorsa and Alberto Merino continue their project of paintings intervened with video. This time, it's a painting of the Sau reservoir that Merino himself created, onto which he projects real-time images of the reservoir's water level and the changing light throughout the day.

Sometimes, the line separating video art from film is very blurred: at the Àngels Barcelona gallery, the Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova reviews a century of his country's cinema through its heroines and the changing roles of women. And in 22nd Street, Julius von Bismarck (Esther Schipper Gallery) transforms aTravelling through a street in Bogotá is a breathtaking experience that reveals the prejudices we carry in our backpacks when we venture into unknown places.