Thinking images to be born again

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n office on Diagonal Avenue saw the birth of Educa tu Mirada, a film school where the symbiosis between the audiovisual, art, and the human is the foundation upon which this oasis of depth is built amidst so much noise. Javier Urrutia, a philosopher and literary theorist specializing in aesthetics and comparative studies, conceived this project in Barcelona, whose seminars now travel through several cities across Spain. It is an itinerant and in-person school that started small, disseminating the keys to the invisible: images, affections, and feelings through films, paintings, literary fragments… tracing threads and crossing thresholds far from the usual technical and conventional approach, and understanding this art as a universal code, as the path to follow to become (or at least try to become) free and conscious individuals.

"We live in a world saturated with information and images, and the worst part is that these images no longer provoke anything in us; they are suspiciously similar and aseptic. How can we feel fascination or illusion for life again?" Convinced that creating meaningful and beautiful images can connect us to reality, which is forged from images, Urrutia assures that nourishing our imagination and our imaginary is also cultivating our being. For this reason, he has surrounded himself with a team that shares his same madness for this discipline, among whom are Andrés Duque ("Iván Z", All You Zombies" or "Oleg y las raras artes"), Mireia Iniesta ("La Academia de las Musas"), Adrián Silvestre ("Natalia Nikolaevna", "Los objetos amorosos") or Rosa Delgado Leyva ("La Pantalla Futurista. Del Viaje a la Luna de George Méliès a El Hotel Eléctrico de Segundo de Chomón") along with other brave individuals who view cinema from the other side of the mirror, and who occasionally gather to resurrect works, ideas, images, projects.

A laboratory to transcend the cinematographic

Works by Dulac, Buñuel, Vigo, Deren, Serra, Mekas, Warhol, Akerman, Brakhage, Anger, Farocki, Zulueta, Weerasethakul... mark the route to explore the limits of the cinematographic in an annual course-laboratory in which authorial and experimental cinema is investigated, because today, they claim from Educa, one can find indications of the cinematographic from the modern practices of youtubers to satellite images or other sophisticated computer processes that in principle have nothing to do with "conventionally" understood cinema. In the syllabus: the hesitation of the real, non-places, feminist terror, geology and new media, the limits of desire...; in the faculty: an experimental filmmaker, an audiovisual theorist, a feminist critic, a philosopher.

It would be enough for the whiteness of the screen to reflect its own light to make the universe explode. Cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon if handled by a free spirit. It is the best known tool to describe the world of lies, emotion and instinct. Luis Buñuel, 1953.

Itinerant seminars on cinema and sexuality, cinema and adolescence, cinema and dance, David Lynch or on borders between reality and fiction or cinema of monsters, shadows and darkness, have been traveling for months between Barcelona, Mallorca and Madrid to educate gazes and remove veils, to learn to see and question and decipher this universal code called "cinema". Intensive seminars that are now eleven but that are mutating and evolving from meeting to meeting. "The themes choose us. The origin is irrational and wild, and little by little it is domesticated, it takes shape in the form of a seminar or course."

With them we can affirm that Barcelona houses one of the most avant-garde and free film schools whose objective is not to teach or talk about technique but about aesthetic sensibility, critical spirit and gender equality. The key is to have broken with specialization and to underline the links and bridges between works, authors and arts to investigate, in depth, the purely cinematographic.

Because "watching movies is being reborn constantly", it is important to learn to see what is being watched, because doing so entails an internal journey, a movement that provokes something in us and breaks with the aseptic gaze that surrounds us. Because seeing, assures the founder of this oasis, "turns us into visionaries, into beings illuminated by the fact of living."