Do we know how many hours we spend in the digital world? Is it equivalent to a half-day? This year’s festival is dedicated to the tensions between the digital space and work. Many of the practices we carry out online are linked to leisure, but they hide dynamics that could be considered work: we have replaced thousands of workplaces by managing our own shopping or leisure on platforms, we feed and train algorithms with our behaviour, our likes and our attention become data that is sent to companies and we play videjocs where we deliver pizzas to earn coins, we cut trees to make firewood or we rest supermarket products.
The venue for the festival will once again be the M|A|C Mataró Contemporary Art, the old Mataró Prison, which has hosted us for the last four years and where we are a resident project. We are also returning to the Cafè Nou and we are very excited to add the Foment Mataroní as a new space, claiming the last remaining cinema in the centre of Mataró, a unique centenary space.
The visual arts exhibition, which takes place every year within the framework of the festival, this year is entitled The Transparent Factory and focuses on the world of video games. While we are used to thinking of video games as a leisure activity, or as a moment of escape, they are increasingly becoming more and more like a complement to the working day. In the transparent factory, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish when we are inside and when we are outside. We commissioned Mataró artist Marc Villanueva to curate this year’s exhibition, and he has generated a proposal that will include work by Marta Azparren, Raquel Friera and Roc Parés.
We also have two new features: on the one hand, we are launching Panóptico PRO, a space dedicated to cultural and audiovisual professionals in Mataró to meet, network and get to know other experiences and projects, which we have created in collaboration with Clack Audiovisual. On the other hand, we also started the educational project with a free session for high schools on Friday 31 May at Foment Mataroní.
To talk about work, we will open with Charles Chaplin‘s Modern Times, a film that ironically speaks of the present despite being almost 90 years old. We can’t miss the film screenings that are already a trademark of the festival in the Prison Courtyard: a live cinema screening by Marta Azparren, specifically designed for the context of Mataró on Thursday 30, as well as the Official Short Film Section on Friday 31. On Saturday we also program two Catalan productions that have been screened at major festivals at Café Nuevo: Robot Dreams and Historia de Pastoras.
The festival will collaborate with Mataronesa organisations such as the Bar del Cafè Nou, which will host a PD Bingos session on Saturday 1st to celebrate the Panòptic Party and award prizes to the rhythm of the best patxanga. We also collaborate with Aiguamoll Records, who are programming the Electronic Vermouth on Sunday 2nd to close the festival.
