Tierra Sin Pan | Land Without Bread
CCE - Centro Cultural de España, 2015

The artist’s most recent work, Land without Bread, comprising the installations The Image and its Double, the Details of a White Rooster, Twin Scripts, Web Sediments y LEWMC, takes as its starting point a crucial and controversial piece in the history of documentary cinema, the film Las Hurdes: tierra sin pan, usually known in English as Land without Bread, made by Luis Buñuel in 1933 and censored at the time by Republicans and Fascists alike. Shot in the remote Extremadura village of Las Hurdes, so poor that even bread was a luxury, the film employs all sorts of devices to emphasize and exaggerate the most extreme aspects of the inhabitants’ lives, mixing Buñuel’s aesthetic obsessions with his determination to produce a provocative narrative about the social conditions of his time.

As a kind of epilogue to the Land without Bread project, Franco developed a complex installation that was originally presented in two rooms of the Spanish Cultural Centre in Santiago.[1] In one of them, two exhibition tables (Twin Scripts, 2015), contain pages from a publication that breaks up Buñuel’s film into its main stills for detailed scrutiny by a reader who here becomes a spectator. Alongside the book pages, like museum object labels, are pieces of wood bearing extracts from the original film’s voiceover (“the only luxury we find in this land of poverty and pain are the churches”, “here too, famished children are taught that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles”). A disturbing presence are the plastic cords that obtrude into the museum-like montage, incorporating into it the connotations “the rope” has as a rough-and-ready tool of suffocation and extermination. Along with this material, presented like a formal museum exhibit, two videos play on screens attached to the wall, simultaneously showing mountain landscapes and the flapping wings of a white cockerel, recorded by the artist. In the adjoining room, spread over the floor and considerably enlarged relative to the size of a computer screen, the unintentional modern-day replicas of Buñuel’s film found by the artist on the Internet make another appearance. They are deliberately unspectacular, as Franco re-photographed them with plastic film interposed and with hard-to-view cuts and angles, and placed them at floor level, where they lie as though discarded (Web Sediments, 2015).