By liberating the documentary from the conditioning and forms in which this genre has been perceived to be confined, the Expanded documentary constitutes a political act as well as an act of or exercise in creative freedom. Freedom, or the lack thereof, can be understood from within the interstices of documentary experience. The act of capturing, transiting, translation, and even immersion in other lives can also be seen as a political act. 

The constellation of documentary forms in the section Expanded Documentary, emerging through the diversity of selected pieces, including, among others, Priya y el enjambre, an augmented reality comic that explores teenagers intimacy; Las Liscas, an installation work in which water is a dark mirror of the real; Ejercicios de aridez, taken from an anonymous image drawn with lime in the Atacama desert, questions us politically and socially; or Discriminator, in which artificial intelligence questions our use and understanding of freedoms, as we have come to know them up to now. 

Following this ethos, the collective curatorship of 23rd MIDBO is led by a tribute that acknowledges Chris Marker as one of the most liberated documentarists. With Chris Marker INT-EXT, a collective curatorship presenting the installation by the Colombian artists Nueve Voltios, explores the possibility of gaining insight into the most intimate aspects of his view on Latin America, as well as to the influence of his work on Colombian artists and filmmakers. 

In this exhibition, the documentary becomes expansive, testing the limits of the form and going much further than a mere representation of reality. The presence of immediate context is traversed by a reflection on the use of immersive and interactive technologies that supersede the logic of entertainment, in order to transit freely around questions of the sensorial and embodied and how they relate to ‘the real’.

Expanded Curatorship Team 23 MIDBO

Coordinator and Curator: Sandra Tabares Duque

Artistic Director: Maria Luna – Rassa