Carmen Roca Igual
Internship: Amalia Ulman and also with Pauline Curnier Jardin
carmenrocaigual@gmail.com, carmenrocaigual.com, instagram.com/carmenrocaigual
Carmen is a lens-based artist working interdisciplinarily between the arts and the film world. Her work resurfaces the meaning of getting to know oneself by trying on different personas. Embracing change as a personal dialogue to have within. Her research on masks, face filters, plastic surgery and augmented reality in her thesis '(M)ask me out' delineates the narrative of her projects.
During the years she's mostly worked behind the camera filming hours of her Spanish family members gossiping meaningfully. She's also participated in other films creating and helping with the set design, costumes, lights and emotions shown on screen.
She often accompanies her videos with an installation that viewers can walk throughout and experience differently. Mixing something as ephemeral as performance and space with videos that will last as long as the Internet lasts.
GRADUATION PROJECT
Novel
Novel is a dramatic musing on the external and internal masks we choose to put on. The video takes place at the beginning of the lockdown in Spain. The characters (Lola, Rosa, Carmen and her Mother) are stuck at home, struggling with inner dramas. Before long they question their own self image out loud as they begin to talk to and even gossip with their selfies and inanimate objects. The girls go through an introspective journey, in a quarantine, accompanied by their phones and devices. New media invents new gestures — like the flickering of a Face Filter with a slight tilt of the head to put our masks back on.
The selfie mount device presented in the movie is an elongation of the body able to record everything you do and able to augment our reality. The mount modifies their living experience by centering themselves to their surroundings and the face filters give them the possibility of expressing themselves non verbally, just as their gestures and costumes do too.
It's a visual intake, parodic at times, on using dialogue and gossip to digest their thoughts. Gossip is the precursor of language, but, has been confirmed unreliable since the 18th-century men said women made it so. These girls gossip to find meaning; trees, jobs and animals fill their words. Carmen is continuously worried about the reaction people have towards change. She talks into the frontal camera because she thinks it sees something other camera's can't.
THESIS
(M)ask me Out
A new entertainment world opened up to make us all actors but just of our appearances. We will be the cyborgs, merging with our technologies. Face filters, deep fakes and plastic surgery can all bring us closer to what we want to be, even if half-digitally. How can we see if finding our selves solves why we came to this world? By merging theory and practice I want to see how masks and creating characters changes us. And how this change affects our personas.