LAP returns for the 2026 edition of the PROYECTOR Festival, with four independent workshops taking place over the course of one week. Each day, different artists, cultural managers and curators participating in the festival will lead a theoretical and practical laboratory, exploring different areas of interest within the universe of moving image and media arts.
Speakers: Andrea Novoa, Taylor Liebenstein, Rui Soares Costa and Sahand Sarhaddi
Maximum capacity: 15 participants.
Spanish and English spoken (no interpretation).
Schedule:
Monday to Friday, approximately from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
Location:
CRUCE (Calle Doctor Fourquet 5, Madrid)
Registration
MONDAY 14 SEP Rui Soares Costa
Time… the Most Boring Concept in Art History… Still, Let’s Keep Moving Forward
Universe: 13.8 billion years (13,800,000,000 years)
Solar System: 4.6 billion years (4,600,000,000 years)
Humanity: 300,000 years (300,000 years)
Neolithic Revolution: 12,000 years (12,000 years)
Industrial Revolution: 250 years (250 years)
Key concepts: Keeling Curve and Anthropocene
Starting from the premise that we have entered a new geological epoch shaped by human activity—the Anthropocene, in which the impact of a single species, Homo sapiens, has become so profound that it will leave measurable traces across geological timescales spanning millions of years—this masterclass reflects on an artistic practice that approaches time not as a fixed condition, but as a material to be manipulated. Through strategies of suspension, expansion and compression, time is treated as a variable in an equation, a parameter that can be adjusted, stretched or folded within the artistic process.
The Keeling Curve, both as a scientific record and as a cultural marker of accelerated planetary change, serves as a starting point for considering the relationship between temporal acceleration and ecological transformation.
Based on principles of parsimony, minimalism, emptiness, seminality, nature and materiality, the practice opens the creative process to the agency of its surrounding environment. Natural phenomena—such as the tides of a river or the atmospheric humidity of a space—become active collaborators, while the artist seeks to withdraw as much as possible from authorial control, allowing the work to emerge through the interaction between material, context and time.
Through four interconnected bodies of work (Lifeline Series, Sweet Series, Rising Series and the Video Series [6h 20m]), the masterclass examines how artistic practice can engage with deep time, environmental processes and the shifting temporalities of the Anthropocene.
TUESDAY 15 SEP Andrea Novoa Camera-less Cinema in 16mm
Camera-less cinema (direct animation or lumen film) strips the cinematic medium of its industrial and technological dependence in order to return it to its tactile and plastic materiality. This workshop proposes recovering the photochemical medium as a pictorial and archaeological territory, where celluloid ceases to be a vehicle for recording reality and becomes the very reality of the work itself.
The session begins with a historical introduction to abstract and experimental cinema in order to understand rhythm, persistence of vision and the flicker of celluloid as forms of formal research, rather than merely as a game. From there, each participant will work directly on transparent film using permanent inks, indelible markers, India ink and enamels, among other materials, exploring the frame as a three-dimensional canvas.
The workshop concludes with a collective gesture: the individual strips are spliced together into a single continuous reel and immediately projected using an analogue 16mm projector. There, the pictorial gesture simultaneously becomes a visual stimulus and a sonic texture as it passes through the optical soundtrack, materialising chance and controlled accident as forms of handcrafted knowledge in contrast to the saturation of the digital image.
WEDNESDAY 16 SEP Taylor Liebenstein
Alive, Toxic and Photosensitive: Experimental Ecologies of Analogue Film
During this masterclass, Taylor will present her most recent interdisciplinary research into the toxic materialities of analogue film and their interrelationships with various ecosystems affected by climate change and human activity. She will share examples from her numerous experiments, in which she seeks both to combine and to replace industrially manufactured analogue film with biologically derived materials and human waste.
This research has been developed in collaboration with scientists—including microbiologists, geologists and toxicologists, among others—from the University of Oslo (Norway) and the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (France), as well as during a series of residencies undertaken across the Nordic-Baltic region.
She will also show how this research has materialised in her most recent works, including the permafrost slide projections presented in her exhibition at Est Art Space, A Feeling of Longing That Freezes and Thaws, as well as new works from the Sublimations toxiques (Toxic Sublimations) series, incorporating handmade emulsions produced from mining waste and photosensitive bacteria collected from polluted bodies of water in France, Norway, Finland and Lithuania.
THURSDAY 17 SEP Sahand Saharddi
Working with Film, Experimental Images and Audiovisual Archives: From Research and Reinterpretation to a Personal Approach
The masterclass will explore Sahand Sahhardi’s process of developing an initial idea into a finished work within film, video and experimental moving-image practices, with particular attention to research, archival materials, reinterpretation and personalisation.
The session will examine how an initial idea gradually takes shape, how research and archival material can be incorporated into the creative process, and how different approaches to editing and rereading existing images can lead to a final work. Throughout the session, excerpts from different works will be used as case studies.
