This week Progressive City is showcasing the work of Spanish film collective Left Hand Rotation, whose next release will be a documentary on social inequality and housing in Lisbon made in collaboration with Stop Despejos and Habita!, two organization that fight evictions and the commodification of housing in Portugal. The documentary is called O que vai acontecer aqui? [What is going to happen here?] and will be premiering this Thursday, September 19th at the Festival HabitACÇÃO in Lisbon.
See the trailer here (closed captioning available in English and Spanish):
Another of Left Hand Rotation’s major works is Ficción Inmobiliaria [Real Estate Fiction], a three-part project that compiles footage from a variety of films spanning disparate genres, eras, and locations whose themes intersect with housing issues, real estate speculation, and gentrification. This project is part of Left Hand Rotation’s platform Museo de los Desplazados [Museum of the Displaced], an open and collaborative archive. Ficción Inmobiliaria can be viewed and read about here: part 1 // part 2 // part 3
Left Hand Rotation is an artistic collective active since 2005 that develops projects that bring together intervention, appropriation, recording and video manipulation. The collective’s efforts have a strong awareness of the importance of the audiovisual record, both for its value as raw capture and also for the potential of each video clip to become units of language whose combination and manipulation enables the transmission of complex messages based on everyday details. The camera cannot help but record the specific context in which it is placed. It is through these snapshots of the local that the collective reflects upon a complex global system.
Left Hand Rotation es un colectivo artístico en activo desde 2005 que desarrolla proyectos que articulan intervención, apropiacionismo, registro y manipulación de vídeo. En cada una de las acciones del colectivo hay una fuerte consciencia de la importancia del registro audiovisual, tanto por su valor como captura en bruto, como por el potencial de cada clip de vídeo de convertirse en unidades de lenguaje cuya combinación y manipulación posibilita la transmisión de mensajes complejos a partir de detalles del cotidiano. La cámara no puede sino registrar el contexto específico en el que se sitúa. Es a través de esas capturas de lo local que el colectivo reflexiona sobre un sistema global complejo.