Con ton y son

In October 2022 the Cervantes Institute in Prague hosted the abstract animation workshop «Muchos metros de película» (Many meters of film), in which a group of schoolchildren, led by artists Laura Ginès and Pepon Meneses, made a collective film emulating the camera-less animation technique popularized in the mid-1950s by artists such as Norman Mclaren, Len Lye or Stan Brakhage.

This technique would have required 35 mm celluloid strips, which - once manipulated - would have had to be mounted and projected in situ, but due to the cost of celluloid and the technical complexity of its projection, the artists opted to simulate the procedure using paper strips, to give priority to the longitudinal treatment of the drawing with respect to the strip and not so much to the frame-by-frame treatment. Thus, using cash register paper rolls as 35 mm celluloid, they worked on paper strips with markers, rollers and pads as photograms, and then photographed the pictures, edited and projected, to create an abstract and gestural collective film in which they play with the concept of dots and stripes in movement: expansion and transformation.