by Alison Hugill // Dec. 15, 2025
In 1976, Joan Jonas first initiated her video performance ‘Mirage’ in the screening room of the Anthology Film Archives in New York, on several nights over the course of a few weeks. In it, Jonas captured a loop of documentary and found footage, sculptural elements, projections of herself drawing with chalk as well as simple live performative actions, like stepping through a small wooden hoop. In a 2010 interview, Jonas described the work—which she would revisit over the years—as being about transformation: the childlike act of drawing and erasing on a chalk board, combined with footage of environmental changes, like storms and volcanic eruptions, gets at the crux of the work’s title, for her. “The word mirage,” she notes, “it’s not something that you can hold, it’s unattainable…”
Noemie Goudal at Alexander Levy Gallery // © Loop Barcelona, 2025, All rights reserved, photos by Nereis Ferrer
The 23rd edition of Loop Festival, curated by Filipa Ramos and titled ‘Miratges Mirages,’ takes inspiration from Jonas’ work and speaks to the mirage as an illusory but eminently desirable, fleeting force through a carefully selected, city-wide exhibition of artists’ cinema. The festival runs alongside the Loop Fair, which specializes in video art and takes place in Barcelona’s Almanac hotel, with each participating gallery showing a video artwork projected in one of the rooms, which visitors can watch from the comfort of the hotel beds and chairs. While there was little overlap between the artists exhibited in the fair and the festival, the festival extended the fair’s interest in artist cinema into the wider urban space of Barcelona, taking up residence in several art institutions as well as unexpected locales.
Joan Jonas: ‘Wind,’ 1968, installation view at Museo Picasso // © Loop Barcelona, 2025, All rights reserved, photos by Nereis Ferrer
Jonas’ early films ‘Wind’ (1968) and ‘Songdelay’ (1973) were both presented on screens mounted in grand, ornamental rooms inside the Picasso Museum. Benefitting from the high traffic of the popular institution, the quirky black-and-white video works met unassuming audiences as well as those who sought them out as part of the Loop Festival program (and gained free access to the museum as a result). ‘Wind,’ which was shot on a snow-covered Long Island Beach, looks as if it could be on another, sparsely inhabited planet: masked and heavily-clothed figures seem to battle the wind, as it dictates their movements into a strange choreography of submission and resistance. A distant clap sounds from ‘Songdelay,’ in which performers in an industrial housing landscape slowly and rhythmically strike pieces of wood together above their heads. Mirrors recur as props in both videos, as well as many of Jonas’ other performances from the time, speaking to the mirage as both a reflection and an illusion, a way of transforming and distorting space.
Nátalia Trejbalová: ‘Never Ground,’ installation view at Hospital Sant Saver // © Loop Barcelona, 2025, All rights reserved, photos by Nereis Ferrer
Nearby, in a 15th century hospital turned hispanic art collection in the historic center of Barcelona, Nátalia Trejbalová probes the Earth’s core in her impressive video work ‘Never Ground.’ Ducking through a tiny wooden door fitted inside an old entryway, one is immediately taken by the surreal colors radiating out of ‘Never Ground,’ screened in a side room next to the entrance. In a highly speculative journey, we begin in a molten landscape with smoke bubbling at its rocky surface, as Trejbalová slowly and methodically takes us into subterranean worlds, to hidden depths that seem (and mostly are) unreal, but possess visual proximity to alien planets, aurora borealis skies and microscopic crystal lattices. Reflecting on urgent topics like resource extraction and the concept of deep time, Trejbalová highlights the link between underground exploration and technological advancement, and the way it emulates a new kind of space race, relying on old ideas of extractivism and colonialism.
Karrabing Film Collective: ‘Night Fishing with Ancestors,’ 2023, installation view at Centre Excursionista de Catalunya // © Loop Barcelona, 2025, All rights reserved, photos by Nereis Ferrer
The next stop on our search for semi-hidden video artworks in the heart of Barcelona took us to the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya (CEC) [The Catalonian Excursionists’ Center], a sporting and cultural organization founded in 1876 and normally offering services like courses in mountaineering and organized hikes. Tucked in an old stone building, Karrabing Film Collective’s ‘Night Fishing with Ancestors’ was screened in a nave-like room with rows of pews, giving an air of reverence to its intimate portrayal of some of the traumas of colonialism, experienced by indigenous communities in today’s Australia. The film follows a moment of contact between Asia and Indigenous people from Australia that predates European settlement, and that was widely considered to be peaceful and collaborative. The Macassan traders, depicted in the film through fireside conversation as well as reenactment, sailed to the Australian coast from Indonesia, from around 1700, to collect trepang (sea cucumbers). Later in the film, a white-faced zombie appears, initiating a violent incursion into the storyline, that relies on concepts of theft and death. It seemed fitting to show this account in the CEC, which was the first organization to publicly teach in Catalan after the Spanish Civil War, when its use was prohibited in the public sphere. Attempts at cultural erasure persist in Indigenous communities worldwide, and this film highlights vital counter-stories, ways of being that are deeply needed in order to combat the course of climate change and environmental degradation.
Elyla: ‘Torita encuetada,’ installation view at Fondacio Miralles // © Loop Barcelona, 2025, All rights reserved, photos by Nereis Ferrer
The guiding concept of the mirage here—deliberately translated in the festival’s title to the Catalan “miratge,” rather than the Spanish “espejismo”—speaks to the transformative potential that Jonas saw in acts of reinscription, new modes of storytelling. As Ramos writes in the accompanying text, the festival “thinks of mirages as images of something desired, which appear for us, even if for fleeting moments, to bring joy, energy, trust and enthusiasm.” Moving images and artist cinema are, literally, these projected images, and in this particular curation we ultimately find them full of hope for another kind of ecological future—an optical manifestation, however seemingly unattainable, of a different world.
