Fauxtograms

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The fauxtograms started as a photo series made in collaboration with Paulina Camu, in which we use pictures of daily-life scenes to create imaginary films.

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The dialogue and film titles bear no relation to the people in the pictures and the resulting characters should not be considered a representation of them.

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Our films and the scenes depicted in the pictures are completely unrelated fictional constructs.

We give each fauxtogram a subtitle, a year, a country of origin and we invent the name of the movie and the director. There is a story behind each fauxtogram, which may be the plot of the movie, or production anecdotes, or things that happened to the actors or to anyone supposedly involved with it. Our original idea was to gather those pictures and those stories in a book we imagined as an encyclopedia of made-up works, in the style of Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the America's or Borges' A Universal History of Infamy.

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The first time this series was shown publicly was during the round‐table talk 3 contemporary mexican visions in Tokyo in September 2019.

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Then, the illustrious Centro de la Imagen invited us to do a screening of the series and we came up with the idea of performing the soundtrack to one of the fake movies during the event. I got together with Codakrom and Oscar Goldman and we wrote a soundtrack for La casa de té and performed it live at the Centro de la Imagen screening in January 2020.

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Since our fake movies were taking on a life of their own, we decided to involve others in the project, and so the prestigious film magazine Icónica and other media such as Noticias 22 Digital started publishing reviews of the movies, as if they had actually been filmed:

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• Conversaciones en el auto de una mujer | Revista Icónica

• La casa de té | Noticias 22 digital

• La casa que quise ser | Noticias 22 digital

• Nosotros somos esa isla | Noticias 22 digital

• Psicología animal | Noticias 22 digital

• Sorgenti Calde | Noticias 22 digital

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The gallery USSR (Un Studio Sobre Revolución) invited  us to do residence that would end in another screening with a live performance of the soundtrack of La casa de té. The residence in USSR was scheduled to start exactly when the social distancing period imposed by the global pandemic started, and we decided to give the residence a twist by doing a takeover of USSR's instagram acount, which we turned into the Discernia Collection, a faux home video distribution company. There we published synopses, video reviews and trivia of the fauxtograms, in addition to film scoring masterclasses, testimonials of industry people describing the influence of some of our fake movies in their own work and film-industry related materials based entirely on the fauxtograms. Some examples follow:

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• Susana Posada talks about ​NON TUTTO CIÓ CHE CONTA (Paolo Canizzaro, 2022, Italy).

• Joserra Zúñiga discusses LIFE ON EARTH (Evelyn Coll, United States 2003).

• Paulina Camú reviews PSICOLOGÍA ANIMAL (Valeria García-Vázquez, Ecuador, 2017).

• Codakrom talks about recording the soundtrack for LA CASA DE TÉ (Silvana Muro, Spain, 1985).

• Alantl Molina talks about writing music for LA CASA DE TÉ (Silvana Muro, Spain, 1985).

To close the residence in USSR, on May 22, 2020 we screened the fauxtograms in a virtual room that people could visit by clicking a link on USSR's instagram account. The musicians were playing in faux live stream and people could walk around the room and view the screening from any angle, including behind the screen.

Here are some images from the virtual screening.

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