Alexandra Cuesta is a filmmaker and photographer who lives and works between Ecuador and the United States. Her 16mm films and videos are portraits of public places and urban landscapes, and the people in them. Reminiscent of documentary practices such as street photography, Cuesta’s work is also rooted in the poetic and lyrical sensibility of the avant-garde. In Focus: Alexandra Cuesta, is the first UK survey of her work and includes all her completed films as well as other films selected by Cuesta, with an emphasis on recent productions by Ecuadorian filmmakers and artists.

Vientos de Chanduy

Mario Rodríguez Dávila | 2022 | Ecuador | 17’ | digital | sound

A brother and a sister perform rituals of illness and passing in a series of haunting tableaux shot in Chanduy, in coastal Ecuador, As Alexandra Cuesta has written, Rodríguez Dávila’s images “bring life to the ghosts of the past and his filmmaking becomes an exorcising gesture.”  

Territorio 

Alexandra Cuesta | 2016 | Ecuador | 66’ | digital | sound

Territorio is a portrait of the people of Ecuador shot in their environs. “[..] the journey opens in the ocean, crosses the mountains, and descends into the jungle. A stationary camera portrays images of the landscape and of people waiting to be observed. The film is shot in three different regions in Ecuador, inspired by the travel journals of Henri Michaux, a Belgian avant-garde poet who travelled to Ecuador in 1926. In his journals, he arrives by boat and explores the various geographies in the country. He describes his encounters through detailed observation, yet by his own account, considers the book to be an incomplete piece. I was fascinated by his fragmentary approach to formal structure and by his raw elegy to the everyday that led me to my own description.” (Alexandra Cuesta) 

In the presence of Alexandra Cuesta and followed by a Q&A