Imagine stepping into a world where art mirrors the shimmering illusions of reality itself—mirages that promise dreams but often reveal the harsh truths beneath. That's the captivating yet challenging essence of the 23rd Loop Festival in Barcelona, themed 'Miratges Mirages,' running from November 11 to 22, 2025. As a fresh face in her role as artistic director, Filipa Ramos draws inspiration from Joan Jonas's 1976 work, weaving a tapestry of films that explore desire, dreams, and the deceptive allure of artists' cinema. But here's where it gets controversial: in a festival celebrating these optical tricks, some pieces flirt dangerously with exoticism, risking a replay of colonial gazes from decades past. Let's dive deeper into this vibrant platform for showcasing, debating, and selling moving image art, complete with a symposium, and unpack how it navigates indigeneity, ecology, and the blurred lines between human and nonhuman worlds.
Artist Elyla shines in both the fair and festival components, their films blending Nicaragua's rich LGBTQ+ history and ancestral roots. Rather than focusing on flashy performances, Elyla treats film as a clear window into real documentation. Take Rumbling Earth (2024), showcased at the fair through Galerie Barbara Thumm. Here, Elyla reimagines a 16th-century colonial folk drama called El Güegüense, donning costumes straight from the tale and traversing a breathtaking volcanic landscape. Their movements, more like a spiritual dance, forge a deep reconnection with the land's ancient spirits. Meanwhile, Torita-encuetada (2023) pops up in one of nine citywide installations, reworking a traditional Nicaraguan fire ritual to express decolonial queer identities. These works boast a blockbuster appeal, but—and this is the part most people miss—they run the risk of being dismissed as mere exotic curiosities. This echoes the 1990s antics of artists like Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who exaggerated indigeneity in museums and films to poke fun at and challenge the colonial consumption of 'others.' Fascinatingly, Fusco even got a solo show at MACBA, aligning with Barcelona's museums hosting moving image exhibits during Loop.
The festival's theme, 'Miratges Mirages,' sets the stage for explorations that feel elusive and tantalizing. Ramos herself highlighted how the Catalan-English title nods to Jonas's work, suggesting artists' cinema as mirages of longing or aspirational fantasies. Two of Jonas's early films—Wind (1968) and Songdelay (1973)—were placed in the Museu Picasso's lavish gold-and-marble rooms. Their grainy, black-and-white footage clashed with the museum's dazzling chandeliers, making the claimed links to Picasso hard to spot. These films are deeply tied to New York's improvisational dance scenes of the 1960s and '70s, not the surrealism both artists loved. Other installations build on Elyla's themes, delving into ecology and indigeneity. For instance, Karrabing Film Collective's Night Fishing With Ancestors (2023) at the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya tackles Captain Cook's 'discovery' of Australia. Karrabing's style is satirical, reenacting real-life struggles like mining invasions in Australia's Northern Territory. While the film touches on marine biodiversity loss, its plot twists into parody, with member Elizabeth Povinelli in zombie-like whiteface playing Cook as a comical DIY sketch. The humor feels undercut by stereotypes, raising questions about whether this is a cheeky jab at the art world's hunger for their work without addressing the underlying inequities.
At the Museu de la Música, Ana Vaz pairs her films with her father Guilherme Vaz's avant-garde music in 'ipsa sonant arbusta' (even the woods themselves echo). A listening space honors his compositions, while a recorded chat between father and daughter about his time with Brazilian Amazon Indigenous communities—where Ana was born—backs A árvore (The tree, 2022). This film loops contemplative 16mm footage of trees swaying in the breeze, subtly shifting with light, weather, or tinted filters. Guilherme's 'modal music' draws from Indigenous lifeworlds, where all music feels modal—think diatonic scales as the bedrock of Western music before tonal harmony emerged. It's a beautiful immersion, but it subtly hints at the privilege in his vision of harmonious coexistence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Then there's Apiyemiyekî? (2019), co-created with activist Egydio Schwade, who pioneered literacy for the Waimiri-Atroari in the Amazon. Featuring Guilherme's A Noite Original (2004), the film overlays Schwade's archive of children's colored-pencil drawings onto stark black-and-white documentary shots of the BR-174 highway and a flowing river. The highway slices through the screen, evoking its brutal history of invading Indigenous lands and the 1970s massacres that claimed thousands of Waimiri-Atroari lives. Drawings of local plants, animals, helicopters, guns, and knives highlight the violence tied to the highway's construction. This layering exposes the fragility of archives as evidence, pitting official records against the river's silent, enduring witness— a powerful reminder of how history's 'facts' can be unstable and contested.
Natália Trejbalová’s Never Ground (2025) invites viewers on an underground journey, her camera gliding like a living being through caves of rock and crystal. Housed in the newly revamped gallery at the Casacuberta Marsans Collection (once a 15th-century hospital for clergy), the film mixes real volcanic vapors with artificial scenes crafted from oil and paraffin. It's a speculative tale of a post-Anthropocene world, where a woman's hummed melodies and soprano-like echolalia bring a human, embodied warmth to the alien terrain. These mirages across the festival point to profound links between humans and the natural world, echoing filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán's symposium insight that artists' cinema can be a 'oneiric medium'—dreamlike—for healing and community. It doesn't always succeed, but pondering its potential is a worthwhile pursuit in our fractured times.
Now, here's the controversial twist: do these works truly subvert colonial narratives, or do they inadvertently feed the same exotic appetites they critique? And is the art world's love for Indigenous stories just performative, without real change? What do you think—does embracing mirages in art help us confront reality, or just distract us further? Share your thoughts in the comments; I'm eager to hear agreements, disagreements, and fresh perspectives!
