On certain summer days in Barcelona, when heat and humidity warp the air, the horizon performs a quiet miracle: the skyline of the city appears mirrored upon the sea. Buildings float, boats rise into the sky. The phenomenon, known as “Fata Morgana”, turns the familiar into the spectral, a mirage of the real produced by the fever of the world itself.
It is an image that could stand for the state of our collective perception. We live inside an atmosphere that is equally saturated—the more we see, the less we perceive. Every day, the world returns to us refracted through algorithms: through loops of videos, through feeds of endless faces and products. Relationships are built and sustained by images, by speculation and dopamine kicks, rather than by the physical sense of presence and proximity. In such conditions, the difference between intimacy and illusion becomes difficult to maintain.
This is the terrain from which Filipa Ramos, the curator of this year’s Loop Festival in Barcelona, begins. Her chosen theme, “Mirages”, unfolds between the themes of ecology, perception, and image politics, posing the question of what it means to look, to believe, and to desire in a time when the real itself seems unstable. In the following conversation, we speak about “Fata Morgana” as both a natural and cultural symptom, about the exhaustion of an image-glutted world, about alienation as a form of knowing, and about the fragile line between representation and reality.
Filipa, since the word “mirage” is so equivocal—used to describe both deception and revelation—I’d like to start by asking how you relate it to artworks. Do you see artworks as creating illusions, or as exposing what lies beyond them?
I was thinking of the mirage in relation to the times we live in. A mirage can emerge out of necessity or desire—like in cartoons, where someone lost in the desert envisions an oasis. It’s a desire born in desperate times, something that may be completely delusional.
The idea of giving the title “Mirages” to this edition of the festival emerged, on one hand, from a direct connection between the phenomenon of a mirage and the production and presentation of moving images. Through projection, you create something that is not physically there. An image that can haunt you, that exists fleetingly and then disappears with the light.
I think we live in a moment with an enormous production of mirages; illusions that can be complex and lead to drastic consequences. Politics today often operates through false hopes for things that are not possible. So, I wanted to think of this ambivalent term as a ghostly figure of deception that can lead us astray. And I wondered: what roles do cinema and the artist play in understanding that they participate in this mechanism of activating perceptive relationships? Does it also have a role in breaking or confronting other, more complex illusions that are being produced today?
And do you think that the practice of art itself has become delusional?
No. Art has this capacity to deceive, but also the capacity to make you dream, to make you want things, even to imagine change. Art has a huge potential to trigger a desire for transformation, in ways that don’t have to be illustrative. It doesn’t mean that art has to be about something, but it can touch you in unexpected ways. Art has this incredible potential, but it also operates within a system that can be highly corrupted. So it’s almost a call for artists to be aware of their immense potential as social agents. I feel that potential is a bit dormant at the moment. Not because artists aren’t engaging in important struggles, but because art itself seems to have been stripped of that capacity.
I agree. When thinking about mirage, were you reflecting on the etymology of the word itself while shaping the Loop’s program, or were you inspired by a specific artwork?
The main reference from the beginning—and one I keep returning to in my curatorial work—is Joan Jonas’s work Mirage from 1976, which she continued reworking over the years. It’s a piece where she was experimenting with connecting early video with performance. She performed both for a camera and for an audience, while incorporating sculptural elements like her chalk drawings on boards.
Joan, who is now rightfully recognized as a superstar, was, for most of her life, not given much attention. Yet she was an incredible pioneer—in her use of video and performance, and in how she positioned herself politically. Not by making overtly political art, but through work that carried strong political positions: Lines in the Sand, for example, made during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or her long-standing feminist stance, and, more recently, her environmental concerns.
For me, she is a kind of mother figure, if she would allow that term—a model for thinking about how art, through poetry, fantasy, and strangeness, can address the times we live in. She shows us that there’s no real separation between a drawing, a song, a performance, a sculpture, or a video—they are all complementary expressive means.
Jonas’s Mirage is not only about reflections on film and art categories, but also about games. Not gaming in a capitalist sense, but joyful and playful timelessness. How do you see the relationship between the festival and this aspect of her work?
Joan’s playfulness manifests both in her live actions and in her structures. A game, after all, is a set of rules that activates relationships—between individuals, or between people and objects. You can play games with stones. Joan is extraordinary in creating dynamics where some rules are clear, and others are completely opaque or strange. She’s often associated with surrealism, and I think there’s a clear intention to engage with reality from a stranger, less direct, non-narrative perspective [in her work]; one closer to how life actually unfolds, which is rarely linear.
Playfulness becomes a form of rehearsal, preparation, and relationship-building—and even a way to deal with conflict. Humor and play are among the best ways to prevent escalation. Joan’s playfulness is also multimedia: when she performs for the camera, she’s playing with herself, the camera, mirrors, and other elements. It creates a grammar of meanings—some legible, others opaque—which makes her work so compelling.
Fig.1
Games can be competitive, communal, joyful, or strategic, and time is essential to their understanding, just like loops. How do you approach temporality in the exhibition?
The word “loop” alludes to an eternal return, a continuous cycle. I like it because it’s a round word—with two Os―that feels circular. It also pays tribute to how film and video installations don’t just play once; they exist in a kind of continuation.
But more than a simple circle, I think of it as a spiral—each time you see something, you see it anew, slightly differently. Your memory recalls other things. No two people remember or narrate a time-based experience the same way, and that uniqueness of recall makes such media so special. In cinema, we call it cinephilia—the capacity to build communities around shared experiences and memories. These time-based experiences involve storytelling, memory, and individuality.
I find this fascinating and largely unexplored in art. I’ve often thought it would be amazing to recreate some of Allan Kaprow’s early environments. In one, he noticed that participants—especially women—began to organize furniture, reflecting an almost epigenetic memory of social expectations. I would have loved to reenact these happenings—not the physical setup, but the act of remembering, of sharing experiences and emotions.
There’s huge potential in understanding memory as a tool for community building, and for creating affect in time-based media. LOOP refers directly to this continuation and cyclicality: not just temporal or material loops, but loops of people, of community.
Loop Barcelona emerges as an economic and curatorial niche, different from many fairs and festivals around. I wonder if that cinephilia you mentioned gives you hope for a format that doesn’t necessarily rely on the categories of the art market or the white cube—however redundant or obsolete that might sound. Do you see it that way, or am I romanticizing things?
I think you said it all. Loop truly exists in a niche sense. It’s funny you mention this, because I do believe the art market is undergoing a massive transformation. We’re not going to see its end tomorrow—these shifts take time—but things are clearly changing. States are defunding cultural institutions, museums are closing. Public museums have less money; private ones are uneven and extremely vulnerable.
A public institution has the duty to preserve the works it holds, but if the grandchild of a major collector is more interested in watches or flying cars than art, entire collections can simply vanish. There’s a huge vulnerability there. When I go to fairs like Art Basel, I sense a kind of geriatric West, while younger collectors—often from Asia—have a completely different relationship to artworks.
People are much more mobile now; we live in transit. You don’t want to accumulate vast amounts of art when your life is in flux. Why would someone collect a videowork when they don’t know what format it will [require] in ten years, or how to store or project it? This doesn’t mean the end of initiatives like Loop. Rather, it will lead to their transformation. Perhaps the market aspect will diminish, while the community, support, and networking dimensions—like museum directors or curators co-commissioning works together—will grow. These collaborations might emerge as new forms of support.
Yes, it’s something that’s gaining momentum—not only today but historically, since ephemeral and loop-based works have long provoked deep social and ecological reflections. If we look back to what Allan Kaprow and Joan Jonas did in the 1970s, we can see how their work helped us understand the structures that sustain our practices today, and how we engage with such formats despite their financial precarity.
Earlier today I was listening to a podcast on the origins of the “degrowth” movement. They were discussing its weaknesses; how it often relies too much on individual, Westernized actions rather than collective ones, but also its valuable focus on changing not just production and consumption, but evaluation. They talked about recognizing the unnecessary elements of society—professions that produce waste, such as marketing, advertising, publicity. These are distractions from what truly matters.
How do you navigate this media-saturated world? How do you handle your curatorial responsibility without becoming complicit in the same redundancy you just described?
By pursuing, and not always managing, a kind of sobriety. A good example is Vroom, an online cinema I co-founded with my dear friend and former partner Andrea Lissoni, in collaboration with Mousse Magazine. Then COVID happened, and suddenly every gallery and museum wanted its own online cinema—its own video platform—to keep grabbing attention and inviting consumption. “We’re closed, but keep watching, keep consuming.”
At some point, we reached a crisis. Vroom had started as a platform to give visibility to works that had taken years and much effort to make but which were shown briefly and then disappeared—to give them a second life. Suddenly, we found ourselves participating in a translation of the physical rat race into the digital [realm]. So we stopped. We needed to think about what we were doing and how to act as curators in relation to saturation.
Vroom has been dormant since then. I still dream of reviving it, but that would require more time and money. Your question is one I constantly ask myself: how much energy do we spend thinking, discovering, engaging with what truly matters—and how much do we simply feed a circuit that moves too fast?
I think you’ve managed that balance quite well. It reminds me of several projects you’ve led that I’ve followed—Vroom, of course, but also last year’s exhibition by Carlos Casas in Venice. It explored non-human perception, the relationship with the camera, and spaces that exist independently of it. I wonder how you think about the mirage from the perspective of an animal or a machine?
Recently I was reading a book on the history of rainbows, and I learned something that might seem obvious but which struck me deeply: a rainbow doesn’t exist in itself. It only manifests through vision. The phenomenon happens in our eyes—in our retina. So it’s not that the sun and the rain automatically create a rainbow. If no one is there to see it, it doesn’t exist. The other day I was walking my dog and saw a beautiful rainbow, and I wondered: do you see it too? Because of course, animals perceive colors differently.
A rainbow, like a mirage, is a fantastic thing—sudden, incredible, fleeting. Some of the works we’re presenting at Loop this year engage with precisely that—traditions of psychedelia and altered perception that distort reality, because sometimes reality itself must be distorted.
One example is a work by the Mexican collective Los Ingrávidos, which emerged during intense demonstrations in Mexico. They refused to reveal their real names out of fear of reprisals. Their work combines footage from protests with images and sounds from non-urban environments—complex sonic landscapes showing how the psychedelic can be profoundly political. There’s a need to decolonize the gaze, to decolonize narratives, to show the deep entanglement between seeing and acting.
Another is the Karrabing Film Collective, which we’re presenting at the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya. They use cell phone cameras not to document their indigeneity for a Western gaze, but in an opaque, nonlinear way that expresses the complexities of their lives; the entanglement between bureaucratic frustrations, their relationship with land, and the tidal zone where they live. “Karrabing” literally means “the moment of low tide”.
For them, the political and the environmental are resolved through distorted vision and psychedelic imagery. Similarly, we’re showing a work by Ana Vaz, which connects sound, memory, and posthuman environments, creating links between humanistic and nonhuman dimensions through music and perception.
Do you also sharpen your own perception through psychedelic experiences?
I’ve done so more in the past than now. But I think we all need forms of alienation—whatever they may be: Tai chi, meditation, a glass of wine at the end of the day, running, micro- or macro-dosing... I think that in order to even know who we are, or what we want, we need to allow ourselves to be high in some way.
Yes—readers, please just get disconnected.
Yes, please.
I have this strong image in my mind from what you mentioned at the beginning: the mirage in the desert. It’s interesting to connect the fact that mirages emerge from environmental conditions—heat, drought, distance. I wonder if it also served as a metaphor for the ecological death we experience today, especially during the festival.
When we began discussing the image and identity of the whole festival with Anna and Alex, our incredible designers, they told me about something I hadn’t known: a real atmospheric phenomenon that happens in Barcelona. When it’s very hot and humid, images of the city appear projected onto the coast—buildings seem to float on the sea, or boats appear suspended in the sky. They thought I was referring to this when I proposed “Mirages” as the festival’s title. It’s a phenomenon known as “Fata Morgana”—this illusion of something that isn’t there, appearing on the horizon of the coast.
Wow. I wonder how you hold that ecological awareness—especially given that many works risk aestheticizing crisis.
I’m often more interested in works that are not about something. The last thing we need is another photograph or video of a seagull filled with plastic caps—images that make us feel guilty or responsible but change nothing. What matters to me is how art can engage with environmental action in a way that reveals something fundamental: that social and environmental justice are intertwined. Wars, occupations, and ecological disasters are all rooted in imperialism, regimes of extractivism, and unlawful appropriation of resources. Environmental and social action go hand in hand. Yet it’s difficult to hold on to this truth, because we live in a moment of such despair that it often feels as if, as individuals, we can’t make meaningful change. And within that, the question becomes: what can art do?
I think the work of Mar Reykjavik responds to that, revealing in her work how certain forms of knowledge are silenced. Could you tell me more about the work she will present during the festival?
Yes, it’s one of the festival’s new commissions. It’s a performance that already existed but which is being reactivated. My assistant curator, Eva Paià, has been closely working on it. Mar is performing in a very interesting space in Barcelona—a small Kunsthaus-type venue called Casa Elizalde. The work, titled To the Wind, includes both a video and a live performance component, very much in the spirit of Joan Jonas.
She explores how abstraction and language can engage with translation—what can be said, what remains unsaid, what’s censored or cannot be spoken. The performance unfolds as a fragmented narrative where different performers engage with what is told, interrupted, or broken. It recreates systems of censorship and obstruction—structures that prevent messages from being transmitted. At the same time, it exposes what is often left untold and celebrates forms of embodied dissonance: when language fails, how do we use our bodies to transmit what cannot be spoken?
We need to continue to pursue saying the unsayable.
//
- Image
Cover: Billy Roisz, The Garden of Electric Delights, 2025, ©Billy Roisz, courtesy sixpackfilm
Fig.1 Bill yRoisz, Lunar Dust, 2024, © Billy Roisz
