a face in the crowd

2021, HD video, 3 non-synchronized films in loop

The work consists of a montage of images obtained from the archives of the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, and more precisely from the corpus entitled “Oloron actualités”: a set of films shot in the 1910s by François Moussay, a filmmaker who documented the daily life of the small town of Oloron-Sainte-Marie, located in the Pyrenean foothills.

In her montage, Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza selects and re-frames the archive images in order to highlight the presence of people who were not the central subject of the original shots, and confronts them with footage she herself shot in 2021. The final ensemble literally places the viewer before the gaze of the anonymous passers-by who, following the artist’s intervention, emerge as the protagonists.