FLOATING SPACES | ART FILMS SCREENINGS PROGRAM

According to Michel Foucault, one of the principles that determine an heterotopia is the ability to overlap in one and the same space multiple time-space realities which are incompatible with each other, for example a movie theater, a mirror or a ship. The ship is actually the heterotopia par excellence and it can be thought of as a !oating piece of space wrapped around itself in an endless sea, a place without place, immobile and in constant motion, a metaphor of a journey that fuels our imagination consider- ably. The ship represents an outstanding place in which divergent realities overlap: on the one hand, the romantic image of sailing to distant and unknown lands, on the other, one linked to the transport sector, maritime trade and economic development of the globalized world. The ship then becomes a metaphor for a time capsule suspended between past and future, or for perpetual motion in a space-time of its own. Moreover, it can also be considered as an apparatus that structures and at the same time analyses the possibilities beyond the cultural, political and social values of the contemporary world and which embodies the paradoxical image of a space where these characteristics and contradictions coexist in the very same place. This consciousness can be noticed to a large extent in contem- porary experimental cinema. Heterotopia might be dubbed a structured idea of an apparatus which enables us to reconsider the real by allowing its inconsistencies and its paradoxes to emerge.