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HEART OF HAWICK
SUNDAY 4 MAY
14:30 – 16:00 / 90′ including Q&A

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Esperanza Mayobre and Andrés Prypchan will join Francisco Llinas for a Q&A.

The films in this programme have descriptive subtitles. The introduction and Q&A will have BSL interpretation.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Francisco Llinas

Excerpts On Extraction is a special performance, screening and discussion event exploring archives of displacement within the Venezuelan diaspora. Curated by Alchemy researcher in residence Francisco Llinas, the event includes a performance of Immigration Services by New York-based Venezuelan artist Esperanza Mayobre; Andrés Prypchan’s never-before-seen restorations of offcuts from Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959); and Carlos Oteyza’s 1981 documentary Mayami Nuestro, screening for the first time with newly translated English subtitles.

First conceived in 2005, Immigration Services assumes new urgency today. Revisiting the work two decades after Mayobre first performed it highlights Venezuela’s transformation, from a nation once buoyed by oil-fuelled socialist hopes to one with the world’s second-largest displacement crisis, with more than eight million people fleeing economic collapse and political repression. The work’s title and arrangement evoke the long, uncertain wait of migrants and asylum seekers striving for legal status and stability. Playing with her name, Mayobre constructs an iconoclastic figure of devotion: Virgen de la Esperanza, Nuestra Señora Madre de los Inmigrantes (Virgin of Hope, Our Mother of the Immigrants). Dressed as a Catholic Madonna, the artist transforms herself into a saint holding a passport, a wad of dollars, and a green card – an irreverent reflection on the American Dream that fuels South-North migration.

Endorsed by its late director, Andrés Prypchan’s restoration of discarded footage from Araya (viewable now) expands on themes of archive, labour and restitution, offering a prelude to the closing film of this year’s festival. Created at the dawn of Venezuela’s oil-driven industrialisation, Araya exposes the continuities of colonial and neocolonial extraction. More than 65 years later, Prypchan – having salvaged 23 of the otherwise deteriorated 250 cans containing Araya’s extra footage – invites us to rethink the film’s legacy in light of Venezuela’s ongoing economic and migration crises.

Prior to an extended discussion, the programme concludes with Mayami Nuestro, which captures the exodus of petro-dollars from Venezuela to Miami in the 1980s, contrasting the country’s social inequalities with Miami’s sanitised consumerism. While Venezuelan spending in the film could be read as a frivolous neocolonial fantasy, Oteyza’s humorous eye also captures a fleeting reversal of global capitalist hierarchies, when oil wealth gave the Venezuelan elite unprecedented power. Today, as millions of Venezuelans traverse the Darién Gap in search of opportunity in the US, Mayami Nuestro resonates anew, highlighting the persistence of economic and cultural hierarchies in the Americas and beyond.

We are delighted to be making Andrés Prypchan’s Araya offcuts publicly available for the first time. Click here to view them alongside an introduction by Francisco Llinas.

This programme is supported by Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, and delivered in partnership with University of Edinburgh, the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University, and Cinesa.

PROGRAMME

MAYAMI NUESTRO
Carlos Oteyza
33′23 – Venezuela – 1981