Howls in the Mountains
Howls in the Mountains is a multi-channel audiovisual installation based on a research project carried out in El Huila, Colombia over a period of one year. The project is based on the stories of women who are active members of Asomhupaz (Association of Huila Women for Peace). Asomhupaz is an association made up of women in the process of reincorporation, victims, peasants and mothers who are heads of households, created in Huila (state in southern Colombia), with the aim of guaranteeing, defending, and strengthening their rights, promoting political participation. and democratic, demanding a comprehensive implementation of the Peace Agreement with a gender approach, an agreement signed between the extinct FARC guerrilla and the Colombian government in 2016.
It seeks to reach a deeper understanding by inviting us to decipher our perception of the world and how we relate to it. So we can see through its holes, through the illusion of consensual reality. When we do that, the world as we know it ends, and we experience a radical change in our perception, another way of seeing.
The reintegration process is an intermediate space, the place and the sign of transition, where we realize that realities collide.
Deep Beyond the Visible
Deep beyond the visible explores possible narratives that potentially reveal what is hiding between the bushes and the foliage. The body of images that compound this collage are taken mainly from satellites registered between 2000-2016 in the Colombian jungle. The images follow river curses; the rivers are the highways of the jungle, which means not only the access route, but also the source of food, water and whatever runs through them.
The stories are part of recordings I recently obtained during my research project in Colombia where I interviewed women who lived, walked, and fought in those territories for more than a decade before 2016. These women were militants of the Farc guerrilla and that was their habitat.
The stories reveal as much as they hide: They bring light to the shade. The shade that the satellite fails in capture; and thanks to that failure they survived.
Blind Engagement
Los Angeles, California 2016 An experience that was dreamed before being experienced How we connect with others?, how our bodies communicate in between each other without words? What is the chemistry, synchronicity, understanding, misunderstanding? There is a lot of information in our surroundings that in despite of give us clarity take us through paths of anxiety and confusion We are aware that it is not worded to believe in everything we see, and most of what we see is just an illusion, To be aware of that take us on the way back to the solar plexus So Now we have to remember, or learn again, how can we see with our heart We are physical connected but we are physical apart in the same way, both are facts and both are physical phenomena The lack of a sense the opening of multiple senses That was what happens for more than 3 hours walking and rolling with our colleagues all the way downtown L.A. 3 days after the Nightmare decision in America took place It wasn’t an speculation or a joke anymore, now it was a fact, a fact that shakes everybody and the most important thing, push up the action Proactive action and not only re action So the great challenge nowadays is how to conspire and act in love and not in hate? Unity unity unity Concept / performance: Carol Montealegre Cinematographer : Luis Guizar Sound designer: Eric Hoegemeyer Performers : Marissa Magdalena Marshall Astor (Badly licked Bear) Eduardo Robles
Body to Body
Berlin, Germany 2017 A woman in exile from both her birthplace and her destination, carrying a child in her body, explores the generation of pain and healing. Movement begins in stillness in a courtyard once occupied by an organization of pure evil. In quiet defiance, she recognizes but does not accept the sins committed by all of our fathers. Instead she listens to her body and translates the future movements of the child inside her womb. Through action and love she transcends the boundaries of surfaces and heals the scars of time.
Telemission
Performed By Carol Montealegre Filmed By Paula Chaves Music By Eric Hoegemeyer Amsterdam, Netherlands / Brooklyn New York
In & Out
TransFormations Trans Film Festival Berlin 2018
As to the actual representation of the image is always, partially, phantasmatic . Peggy Phelan
This proposal was an action to be seen online.
The body is the central theme. The body in interaction with Other bodies, establishing a dialogue with other bodies, with themselves, with the camera, the political body, the social body , the human body .
This action was developed in a house, a space characterized by the heat that awaits freedom of a un certain intimacy, an intimacy that speaks to the viewer spectrum, With Those experiencing the experience From their computers, but Between Those Who Are Also making the experience there
Participants will be six artists (friends) invited to undertake simultaneously several actions in the same space. Such actions allude to their privacy, with Their bodies Their relationship, and not just as Individuals but as a mass of Individuals coexisting as a single living organism, a social organism.
I 'll take the camera, the camera will seek to reach the remote corners most of the time, moving through space, approaching the textures produced by details of moving bodies. Transit through these bodies.
Here the camera (videographer) is also doing a performance, is transiting through the actions.
H in Mars
This was a performance that happens during 13 minutes in a dark room at Academia de San Carlos, Mexico City.
Re thinking simultaneity in a game between actions, light and darkness where the camera became a performer also. This action wasn't create for the camera itself but at the end I decide to play with the visual material. The video is not the performance.
Love Will Make Us Free
Battery Park, New York 2017 The combination of different dimensions, the communion of visions, the destruction of the obsolete for the re birth of the opportunity. This action releases on the opportunity that love and re union beyond borders brings, Opening gates and welcoming all worlds as part of the diversity on earth. As there is plenty of animal and plant species, there is plenty of cultures and world visions in human beings, and all of us deserve to live in this planet just for the simple fact of have being born here, And not only live but move all over without borders, with our hearts, ours ideas, our visions and our love, Love, the unlimited substance, the universes force that keeps everything in motion She represents the wise, the one that is able to transcend and destroy the structure of what was imposed but not functional, or only useful for the very few, she opens the gate liberating the man of a limited way of thinking, and covers him with the sutil and grace freedom of love, that not only embrace him but brings the memory that all are part of the wholeness, where everybody comes from, belongs and goes at the end of the days. The eternal motion of cosmos. El amor nos hara libres (Love will make us free) By Carol Montealegre & Eric Hoegemeyer
Red Couch
A woman reaches an apartment in downtown Mexico City.
While she is going upstairs, she turns her camera on, and from the moment she press the REC button starts recording everything that happens around.
The place she’s visiting is a performance space where six different people are developing different actions simultaneously.
The camera is not just a witness of what happens, the camera became a subject who happens, walk, observe, travels in the spaces between people, passing by the most remote corners. The camera and the person carrying are one and are doing their share to see together, silently observe what happens around them, and likewise they happen touring the department where they have been invited, she and her camera walk, stop, but not flash until the moment they decide to close the door and turn the camera off.
Performers
Rosario Cobo
Luis Almendra
Alejandra Rivas
Marcela Varela
Andres Albdenur
Miguel Jara
Andres Parra
Reminiscence of a Battered Field
Four women find themselves excavating the ruins of a war at Forte Marghera in Venice; the room where this delusion took place was a room full of explosives that exploited back in WWI killing many people at the Forte, mainly man and nurses. The women though about the widows that the war, any war left behind.
Human Manifesto
Human Manifesto
Our destiny is to take root among the stars
Now that the stars inhabit in every single living being on earth
Including us, humans (…)
When do we lose the track?
When do we forget what we are made off?
When do we forget that planet earth is our main body?
That we are as part of it, as the cells are part of the blood that runs through our veins
“we envision a world without wars, violence, prisons, capitalism,
we want to claim the vast space of possibility by birthing visionary stories.
Starting by the process of the decolonization of our imagination now that is
The most subversive form there is: For is it where all other forms of decolonization are born.
For those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must remember
that we are already science fiction walking around in two legs.
Our ancestors dreamed us up and bend reality to create us.
Are we brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries of “the real” and then do the hard work of sculpting reality from our dreams?” (Imarisha, 2015. Introduction Octavia´s Brood: Science fiction stories from social justice movements)
Now imagine this:
One lies in the grass and slowly became one with the grass,
The particles of the existence itself start connecting deeply with all the atoms in the space
Suddenly
The air and I, are one.
The insects, the leaves, the worms, the birds, the clouds, the thunder, the stars.
Im one with earth
Im one with water
Im one with fire
Im one with everything
This is the most brilliant and highest legacy from my ancestors.
Now is my responsibility to remember it in every heartbeat,
Share it through the sound vibration that sustain us simultaneously while dancing in the universe
What they have sold us as reality is as limited as their miserliness
We are greater, greater, greater than that.
It is time to wake up from the nightmare and step back into the light
The Splitting Of Memory
Fragments of a journey called life.
Camera director, film, and sound edition by Carol Montealegre
Music by Eric Hoegemeyer
2019