The Baroques. A film from the beginning of the century (film) - Juan Domínguez with María Jerez

The Baroques. A film from the beginning of the century​

At the beginning of the 21st century, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a global lockdown. 

Millions of people spent months shut in their houses. Millions more had to go out to work in the middle of the pandemic.

Many projects of different kinds were postponed or cancelled.

The video call format provided by software such as Zoom, Skype and Jitsi, among others, were some of the means by which many of these people were able to communicate, telework and continue to develop projects whilst locked down.

During this period the notion of time was often distorted, attention increased without you realising it and everyday situations had an oversized relevance or became totally absurd.

Bewilderment, uncertainty, anxiety, idleness, hyperactivity... There were emotions of all kinds. Mistrust, even suspicion of a door handle that you had been staring at for a long time.

Depending on the character and, as always, the economic situation, everyone experienced this state of alarm differently.

After the first moments of bewilderment, María and Juan continued to work at a distance via screens from their respective confinements in Berlin and Madrid.

The images for this film were shot from inside their homes, including more or less everyday objects and work materials, as well as images that could be seen through their windows and courtyards. 

A year later, they decided to get together and edit these visual conversations.​

A production by Juan Domínguez. 

Created and interpreted by María Jerez and Juan Dominguez.​

Juan Dominguez is a maker and organiser within the fields of choreography and performing arts. His work advocates the complete dissolution between fiction and reality, using the former to produce the latter and vice versa. His work always facilitates participation, looking for different ways of understanding commitment and co-authorship.

Some of his recent works include Rhythm Is The Place (2023), This Is Not Normal and This Is Still Not Normal (2021-2022) in collaboration with Arantxa Martínez and Tálamo (2020). He was the artistic director of the Festival In-Presentable / La Casa Encendida (2003-2012), co-curator of Living Room Festival (2010-2017) and co-curator with Arantxa Martínez of Festival Avant-Garten at Internationales SommerFestival Kampnagel (2017).

The work of María Jerez (Madrid, 1978) is situated “between” choreography, film and the visual arts. Beyond the interest in her first pieces from theatrical and cinematographic conventions and the spectator’s implicit understanding of them, in her latest works, she seeks to question this relationship by opening up potential spaces through encounters with what we find strange and alien. Her most recent work insists on the performative nature of the encounter as a space for transformation. In this process of transformation, the “other” is lodged in oneself, establishing blurred borders between the known and the unknown, the object and the subject, the animate and the inanimate. Her work tries to escape from logocentric and anthropocentric logic, where human knowledge itself becomes vulnerable to other enigmatic and complex ecosystems. María Jerez combines the production of her artistic work with pedagogical, curatorial and editorial projects.​