New Artist Member: Alexandra Cuesta
Posted January 22nd, 2025 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Films, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is pleased to welcome Alexandra Cuesta to the collection!
Alexandra Cuesta is a filmmaker and visual artist who combines experimental film traditions with documentary practices. Her 16mm films and videos are portraits of public places, urban landscapes, and the people in them. Reminiscent of documentary practices such as street photography, Cuesta’s work is also rooted in the poetic sensibility of the avant-garde. Early films such as Recordando el Ayer, Piensa en Mí, and Despedida, shot in the United States where Cuesta received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, depict migrant neighborhoods and diasporic communities (mainly Hispanic) – and they do so with a poignant sense of longing and belonging. Recent works such as the autobiographical series Notes, Imprints (On Love) (2020-ongoing), and the Structural/Materialist Lungta (commissioned by FICUNAM in 2022) foreground the act of filmmaking itself.
Her work has been widely screened at venues and festivals such as Cinema Du Reel, Viennale International Film Festival, FID Marseille, New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Oberhausen, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, National Art Gallery of Ontario, Punto de Vista, among others. She received an MFA in Film and Video from Cal Arts-California Institute of the Arts and a BFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video.
Four of Cuesta’s films are now available from Canyon Cinema, including:
Despedida (Alexandra Cuesta, 2013, 10 minutes, color, sound, 16mm)
Shot in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this transitory neighborhood resonates with the poetry of local resident Mapkaulu Roger Nduku. Verses about endings, looking, and passing through, open up the space projected. A string of tableaus gather a portrait of place and compose a goodbye letter to an ephemeral home.
Piensa En Mí (Alexandra Cuesta, 2009, 15 minutes, color, sound, 16mm)
Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative meditation on public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.
Beirut (Alexandra Cuesta, 2008, 8 minutes, color, sound, 16mm)
A journey into a foreign country begins with a handheld camera looking through the window of a car. Raindrops in the glass abstract the cityscape separating the inside from the outside. Guided by fragmentation we see mirrors, reflections and shadows. The imminence of danger is at once palpable as it is distant. Within the backdrop of another film shoot, the narrative springs from in-between moments, carrying with it a sense of urgency and chance that render like quick entries in a diary.
Recordando El Ayer (Alexandra Cuesta, 2007, 9 minutes, b&w, sound, 16mm)
This is a portrait of Jackson Heights, a condensed area of Queens, New York, that has become home for a high concentration of Latin American immigrants. This is an effort to document this space, in this specific moment in time, and to make it visible. As an immigrant myself, I was struck by the physical manifestation of a city landscape that has been slowly modified and reconstructed to resemble another. The neighborhood with its streets and textures and sounds becomes a mirror not just of another place but also of another time, and of a past that is built upon collective memory. (Alexandra Cuesta)
