La pantalla mágica is a work in the style of a promotional video that shows the Cuidad de la Luz (City of Light), a film studio of some 320,000 square meters built in 2005, by public initiative, in Alicante, Spain, with the idea of turning it into the European Hollywood. Yet fourteen years later, its sets, warehouses, design workshops, dressing rooms, make-up rooms, offices and back lots lie vacant, after the authorities decreed its closure in 2014. It has since been put up twice for auction and is currently on sale with a view to somehow keeping it in operation.
We are taken round the filming facilities in the City of Light by a presenter who explains in detail the purpose and characteristics of each space. Along the way, our visit becomes an anatomization of the audiovisual image, and a meditation on the power and importance of fiction, cinematographic in this case, as a basis for the construction of reality and its perception. To what extent do cinematographic stories act as a scenario and projection of collective dreams? The history and life of the moving image are present throughout our audiovisual journey round the City of Light, which at the same time interrogates the existence and survival of this kind of imaginary. The film studio is a ruin that invites us to reflect on projects that fail, but also on how these same projects can end up as places that are visited, venerated and mythologized.
Video, 21’ 40’’
