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The Softest Mud That Sees


2022

—Blanc, El Fang. La Màquina Solar Més Suau
Solo show curated by Margot Cuevas, Racoon Barcelona

2021

Screening Room, Residency 11:11
Podcast on this work with facilitators Giulia Shah and Alex Bell

2020

Goldsmiths MFA Degree Show London

Digital video, 8´ 57”

Fireworks teach us that, contrary to popular belief, mystery does not happen in obscurity, but in the excess of light.

Angel González García, 2007  

The Softest Mud That Sees is shot mostly on location, with a few short pieces of found footage interspersed throughout. The film opens with the euphoric description of a goal being scored, after which you are led through a variety of contained and constructed worlds; terrariums, shop displays, museological recreations of antiquity, and a studio where special effects are produced. 

You see the day-to-day management and manufacture of wonder and awe; the mechanisms, professional labour, and atmospheric tricks that produce these environments for their viewers. These processes are in direct contact with the reality around them; they are not explained in technical detail, but observed in the world, as mundane operations among others. The magic of the spectacle is shifted from its familiar audience position - that of suspended disbelief - and back onto the practical realisation of the effect. The specialists that we see are professionally engaged and wrapped up in their labour: designing and testing a fake blood-pumping system for a violent shower scene. They are busy, making conversation, having fun, testing the props while they work. 

In the film, there is also a particular focus on artificial lighting, and the ways in which it produces varied moods and responses. This is evident across the various scenarios: the reptile terrariums, butcher shop, and London Mithraeum. The butcher uses pink lights to intensify the brightness of the red meat and make it look more fresh and appetising, a technique so effective that it has been banned in some countries under false advertising laws. 

However, the audience to these lighting illusions are absent from the scenes. The butcher’s shop window is shot after dark, through security screens, blurring the texture of the meat pieces with the radiance of the neon. The museum and the reptile shop appear empty, without visitors or clients. Instead, the neo-baroque lighting becomes the film’s character, the animating body in each place, working overtime to provide them with their temporary, mythic atmospheres. This ever-shifting light, which appears and reappears in new forms throughout, is the film’s protagonist; it rehearses and joins the narration of the film. 

There is also a soundscape that runs beneath the shots and complicates them. It is not synchronised with the breaks in the footage, and much of the film is silent. Through a few scenes, there is a motif of underwater movement and the songs of whales in the ocean. The soundtrack is subtle, minimal, ever-present, and implicated with depth and darkness. What began in ecstatic good cheer, with the football commentator (“Why should I care if I kill my throat?! Goooooooooaaaaaaaaal!”), ends up dissolving into almost abstract bubbles and bloops - the audio produces a second animating figure, less visible and insistent than the artificial light, but similarly ever-present as a structuring force in the film.