Lois Patiño

Lois Patiño (Vigo, 1983) holds a degree in psychology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and has studied film at Tai (Madrid) and NYFA (New York) as well as completing an MA in Creative Documentary at Pompeu Fabra University. His videos and video installations have appeared at national art centers like MACBA, CCCB, La Casa Encendida and MARCO, and abroad in Centro Cultural San Martín (Buenos Aires), Konstnärshuset (Stockholm), Copperfield Gallery (London) and JIFF Art Gallery (Jeonju), among others.
He has shown his films at events like the New York Film Festival, Toronto, Rotterdam, the Viennale, Bafici or Cinéma du Réel, receiving awards at Locarno, Oberhausen, San Francisco, Clermont-Ferrand…
He is represented by Galería Rocío Santa Cruz (Barcelona), Galería Vilaseco (A Coruña) and production company Zeitun Films.

Tiempo vertical, 2016
(Video installation)

In the Moroccan desert, night dilutes all forms. After this nocturnal abstraction, light begins little by little to restore dimension to space and volume to the body.
Motionless figures dot the landscape. Stillness concentrates the gaze and the passage of time increases its density: a thick silence seems to advance across the sand. Then comes the adhan – the call to prayer – and the immobility that once condensed begins to radiate: now it is the bodies that become diluted in the desert.

“Immobility radiates”
(Gaston Bachelard)

Fajr has two meanings in Arabic: it can mean dawn, or else the adhan – the chanted summons to prayer – that issues from the mosques just before sunrise. These chants are heard five times a day in Muslim communities. Voices that ring out over the kasbahs, the palm groves, the dunes… A reminder that beyond daily life there lies a spiritual one. When the words of the chant reach our ears, the daily rhythm of life takes on a new fluidity, we shift to a new mode of experiencing time. More introspective, undoubtedly, an inner time that is accordingly more open and profound. The chant marks an interruption, a break in the daily flow, and when it ends, things resume their normal rhythm.
The desert, that mythical place of spiritual retreat, with its absence of forms and suspended time, has harbored many hermits and prophets drawn to its solitude. As in Nietzsche’s urging to go forty days into the desert and lose weight.
The desert transforms, in response to its vastness, provoking an inner condensation. The open space all around you, with no visual stimulus to fix on – Borges refers to the horizontal vertigo he felt in the desert – leads to a submerging in the self. A meditative concentration that may end up transporting the hermit to a state of spiritual ecstasy, of depersonalization: leaving behind the self to dissolve within the Whole.