Galerie Anne Barrault is delighted to welcome Liv Schulman’s second solo exhibition to the gallery.
Her new film Un circulo que se fue rodando was made in the streets of Buenos Aires, and more specifically in the Microcentro, with actors, friends and aunts of Liv Schulman.
In the streets of the Argentinian capital, a group of 40 characters wearing T- shirts with slogans printed on them, move in a strange choreography of five sequence shots. The camera pans the streets, banks and bars, recording the protagonists’ dialogues.
Un circulo que se fue rodando is a psychiatric portrait of a society in permanent crisis.
The words quickly spread across the street, mixing with the ambient noise and forming a “collective ballet” that would allow each individual to be in one and the same group, and to exchange.
The exchange of money is a recurring theme in her film, warning that the peso is becoming extremely weak and that the dollar is gradually taking over more and more space. It’s easy to see how Argentina’s economic and societal crisis is distressing the people, who try, as best as they can, to reassure themselves by talking about light and surreal subjects such as astrology, esotericism and the new occultist religion, until “Politics becomes esoteric to cope with the crisis.” (1)
The neighborhood I filmed is also my own. I spent a lot of time in the streets, bars and buses, listening to what people were saying. At the same time, I went through the archives of the women’s prison (between 1904 and 1970) in Buenos Aires, a prison run by French nuns, and there I saw that there were many women who were locked up for “psychological” problems, but which in fact were questions of morals and behavior related to the body and sexuality in a public context. I also compiled a lot of stories told to me by a Guarani psychiatrist from Misiones, (a city on the Argentinean coast): Dr. Sebastian Baez. And then I invented things inspired by the city’s own resources.
The result is a film written on three pillars: economic problems, psychiatric problems and a contraceptive method of liberation.
The choice of route is a semantic choice in relation to the names of the streets: from Libertad we move on to Corrientes, then Florida, where dollars are exchanged for pesos, and from there to the City, where the film ends, in the Communist Party’s cooperative bank. I wanted to transcribe an economic and emotional history of the city in the course of the film.” (2)
(1) Excerpt from Santiago Villanueva’s text, “La pose et les mots”, 2024 in the publication dedicated to Liv Schulman’s performances, to be published by Temblores Publicaciones, Fall 2024.
(2) Liv Schulman interviewed by Nicolas Feodoroff for FID Marseille 2024.