This is the cinema Sala Augusta, located in Palma. Prior to its transformation into a cinema, it served as a significant prison for individuals opposed to the regime, including teachers, civil servants, and soldiers who remained loyal to the republic in 1936. During the onset of the civil war, it functioned as a wood storage facility. Remarkably, it wasn't until 2011 that any indication or acknowledgment was made regarding its history as a site of crimes during the dictatorship.
Maria Antonia Ólivers’ grandfather has been imprisoned at this very site and has remained among the disappeared ever since. Similarly, Tonina Mercadal's uncle, Jaime Serra Cardel, was detained here before being executed in Illetes.
How do we perceive the cinematic depictions of this place when we engage with its history from various viewpoints, drawing upon diverse sources and voices?
The project examines the places less in terms of their topographical extent, but rather questions their conditions.1
Thinking and theory is not only possible through language and a film can think in images. But of course film is not just an image or, more precisely, a moving image, i.e. a sequence of images, but also their arrangement, sequence and rhythm are part of a cognitive process. The media scientist Volker Pantenburg writes in his work “Film as Theory”: “Why should theoretical thinking necessarily have to take place linguistically?”2 Or as the title of a Spanish-language publication on the essay film is: La forma que piensa3 The form that thinks.
I would like to expand Pantenburg's thesis to the effect that film research is not just about visual thinking, but also about audiovisual thinking. Language and especially poetic language play a role in experimantel video art, as do breaks between sound and image as a means of shaping the essayistic or experimental film.
With Pantenburg's expanded thesis, I can more easily find answers to the question of how do I make discursive memory visible or, rather, conceivable. How do universal questions intertwine with remembrance and how do current developments in remembrance cultures and discourses, society, migration, (post)-colonialism and European remembrance? Because these intertwine in a variety of ways and, as described above, also on the auditory level. Also, in audiovisual thinking, the images question the voices and the voices question the images.
