Maya Deren. A cadence of images

The Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món presents this temporary exhibition about Maya Deren and her works. Defined as a filmmaker, writer, poet, dancer and ethnologist/anthropologist (she travelled to Haiti between 1947 and 1955), Maya Deren is essentially one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers and a key figure in twentieth-century experimental cinema.

The many ways in which Deren has been labelled allow us to navigate her work and subtly allude to the perspective, signs, movements, dances and symbols that make her work unique and deeply interlinked.

Her filmography is not extensive (six completed projects and several unfinished ones) and her work —experimental, speculative, intuitive, poetic, symbolic, visual and seemingly incomplete— consists of various interwoven fragments that are simply persistent, repetitive tendencies, albeit meaningful enough to eventually form a coherent whole. One image becomes another, just as one concept becomes another, threaded together by the camera or the written word. A constant unfolding of images and texts. Undoubtedly an inexhaustible cadence.

The exhibition does not follow a chronological order, nor has a biographical structure. The exposition’s itinerary brings all these elements together and invites visitors to engage with a ‘poetic’, enveloping and profoundly visual arrangement which induces choreographic movement and leads to the final space: the one devoted to her project on Haiti.

The exhibition runs through her six finished films, as well as some of her unfinished projects, some of which are displayed in audiovisual format and others through a selection of stills. Written text comes to the fore in the final space, which is organised as an ‘archive’. It displays a sequence of images and texts, as well as a cadence of voices which accompany Deren’s: the voices of Alejo Carpentier or Edwidge Danticat.

Catalogue
The exhibition comes with a book containing a text written by the curator and three essays on Haiti by the lecturer in modern and contemporary history at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona David Martínez Fiol, the writer Edwidge Danticat and the professor of folklore and comparative literature at the University of Abuja, Nigeria, Gboyega Kolawole. It concludes with an extensive biography of Deren.

Inside the book is a fold-out with a selection of stills from Deren’s films, designed to be opened and displayed as an object, forming the shape of a star. This visual and textual interplay captures the essence of both the exhibition and the filmmaker’s work.