Gerard Ortin Castellvi
Gerard Ortín Castellví is an artist, filmmaker and researcher from Barcelona, based in London. After completing an MFA at Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), he finished an MA in Artists’ Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is currently doing a PhD. He is a mentor at UCL Creative Documentary by Practice MFA.
His works have been shown in places like Tate Modern (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), OCA (Oslo), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Anthology Film Archives (NY), Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice), and in festivals like Visions du Réel (Nyon), Open City Film Festival (London), Cinéma du Réel (Paris), KVIFF (Karlovy Vary), HKIFF (Hong Kong) and Berlinale (Berlin).
Gerard Ortin Castellvis website
About Castellvi´s films Bliss Piont (2023), Agrilogistics (2022) and Future Foods (2020)
Bliss Point (Trailer) from Gerard Ortín Castellví on Vimeo.
Bliss Point Synopsis:
Bliss Point (2023) plunges us into the ever-accelerating rhythm of food supply and the emergence of new techno-capitalist processes. The film guides us from dark kitchens and food advertising sets to AI-managed warehouses. A delivery rider cycles across the city to a makeshift trailer where workers flip burgers. Algorithm powered robots buzz through a sprawling grid of crates and 3D printers stack layers of computer-generated data to produce food alternatives. Drawing from the concept of optimal palatability, Bliss Point reveals the entanglement of automation and human labour, and the ways in which the aesthetics and the politics of food intersect. Together with Future Foods (2020) and Agrilogistics (2022), it completes a trilogy on scopic food regimes.
Agrilogistics Synopsis:
Agrilogistics (2022) looks at recent technological transformations in contemporary industrial agriculture. Tulip bulbs, chrysanthemum stems and vine tomatoes are processed through cameras, feeding datasets that regulate their own growth. During the day, the greenhouse is a cinematic device, an automated film set optimized for the mass production of fruits and flowers. At night, the factory stops: without an inside or an outside, the greenhouse becomes an oneiric chamber where plants, animals and machines form new entanglements.
Jury Award: Best National Film at Documenta Madrid (Madrid, SP)
Agrilogistics Teaser from Gerard Ortín Castellví on Vimeo.
Future Foods Synopsis:
Future Foods (2020) revolves around the making of plastic food at the workshops of Replica LTD, one of the few UK based companies that still manufactures props for films, advertisements and displays. The perception of food, its appealingness and palatability through a constructed image, come into play when observing these hand-crafted manufacturing processes through a camera. A phone conversation with the CEO of a Finnish future foods’ start-up introduces us to a cutting edge technology consisting of the production of a new protein generated from water, electricity and CO2 captured from the air. Solein is a new technology that speculates with a near future without agriculture and land use effects.
Future Foods (Trailer) from Gerard Ortín Castellví on Vimeo.