Laida Lertxundi


Laida Lertxundi is a Spanish filmmaker and university professor of fine arts based in the United States.

Biography

Born in Bilbao, Spain, in 1981, she moved to study in the United States, where she lives. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bard College in New York and an MA from the California Institute of the Arts. She is a professor of Fine Arts and Humanities at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, having taught at the University of California in San Diego and CalArts.
Her vocation for cinema began during her studies at Bard College, when she learned about the work of different filmmakers such as Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren and Michael Snow. Her films, mostly shot in 16 mm, are located in natural, urban and domestic spaces in and around Los Angeles, where she has lived for a decade. Included under the generic title "Landscape Plus", they move between the intimate spaces of interiority and the magnitude of the great open Californian landscapes, with the intention of encompassing a geography transformed by affective and subjective states.
In her cinema, the cinematographic forms of narration are diluted and replaced by the revelation of process and materiality. Through an intense work of relationship between images and diegetic sounds, the synchrony creates a sensation of real time and lived experience, a tension between form and that experience that always surpasses it. In this way, the more formalistic or abstract aspect of her cinema, with a structural vocation, is pierced by an emotional tone, at the same time as it gives rise to false clues about ambiguous fictions. Her films include Footnotes to a House of Love, My Tears Are Dry, Cry When It Happens, A Lax Riddle Unit, The Room Called Heaven, Live to live and 025 Sunset Red —premiered at the MoMA— In addition to the MoMA, her works have been shown at the Lyon Biennial, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.