LAIA - TORRE is a connection between two sister projects. Laia is a filmakers co-op structure working in the fields of cinematographic and artistic production, as well as all free forms of critical thought. It emerges in the city of Porto and the activities that we hold include film production and directing, film projections and training, artistic residencies and the support of complementary productions.
Laia hosts a film laboratory, Laboratório da Torre, specialized in analogue media, super8, 16mm and 35mm, integrating digital formats as well. This lab fosters new experimental practices and materializes film projects, through partnerships and collaborations, open to the international community.
LAIA - TORRE activities related to Spectral:
Artistic residencies:
- Primal Light Residency Program -
Exploring E.C.A. as a form of land art and ritual practice, this residency program will include a series of walks, experiments, workshops and projections that take place outdoors and engage with the surrounding landscape and environmental conditions of the northern region of Portugal. This program is developed around ancestral megalithic and geological heritage sites, lighthouses, lakes, waterfalls, and mountain ranges, in order to engage with the natural environment as a source of primal light, time and motion, in pace with the times. These residencies, with the duration of 1 month, will host international guests who will be able to showcase their results publicly.
- Challenging the Cinema Room -
This event aims to challenge the traditional limitations imposed by the architectural conception of the cinema room. This event consists of occupying the cinema space and introducing new models of exhibition and experience such as: other screening surfaces (i.e. stones, reflective materials, fluids, etc.); multi-channel or loop-film; new audio systems (i.e. radio wave or real-time sound receptors and manipulations); new lighting sets; a more dynamic and free displacement in the room (cross-combining the cinema room with the gallery exhibition or the open-air screening. The program will combine old media with new media devices, such as analogue systems and hand-made processes in combination with mixed-media. As an experimental practice, it will be produced through collaborative work between artists, scenographers, musicians, architects and collectives from diverse fields from the city of Porto.
Networking Events
- Symposium La Machine Animale - On Cosmological Futures -
A selection of speakers and films will deal with the ideas of animism and cosmology in relation to our contemporary times. Film, animation and animism are gathered as tools of achieving sorts of spectral envisioning and meta-knowledge, as counterpoints to the specialization of study fields that seem to hermitize social sciences. This symposium aims to share images, thoughts and reflexive discourses regarding film and animation as open medium for the production and transmission of knowledge. That is, from the question of decapitalizing and decolonizing western-based philosophical approaches, which have been mainly molded by European modernism. This symposium aims to reflect on film by way of its own mechanism either by giving life (animation) to still-frames, or through the potential of storytelling as a trigger of future imagination.
Educational Activities
- Cinematic Summits Cauldron -
Cauldron are cinematic summits, where members of the independent film labs network will gather at Laboratório da Torre (Tower Lab) and other sites in Porto city to partake in a series of educational, network and programming activities. Each summit will host one co-applicant to conduct an intensive one week workshop. This will allow for a training space and skill sharing platform around cinematic media and analogue formats.
