film performance by Pablo Agma
2025-09-06 | 8 PM
A luminous ceremony in which the film abandons the limits of the screen and, amid fire and smoke, desire and sin are celebrated. The projectionist assumes the role of the altar boy, addressing the act of projection as a ritual gesture: the image becomes confession; the cinema hall, a space of passage. The codes of the mass are rewritten from a queer and critical perspective.
Altar boy and his sins is a film-performance that combines analog projection intervened in real time, live sound, and scenic action. Structured in three acts, it reconstructs the fragmented memory of an ecclesiastical childhood. Ceremonies, revelations, and whispered confessions unfold through a flickering, unstable image that overlaps, decomposes, and resists narrative linearity. The dissolution of traditional editing gives way to a perceptual drift, where recording time and playback time coexist and contaminate one another, generating a hybrid temporality.
Three 16mm projectors form the technical core of the piece. The operator intervenes in the beam of light, playing with loops, filters, and lenses in real time, giving the devices a scenic presence. This role, in dialogue with the figure of the officiant, makes visible its performative nature, inhabiting the space through ritual gestures. The live manipulation of analog mechanisms, together with the musical compositions of LeChatelier, turns the projection into a shared act in which the connections between cinema, liturgy, and memory are brought to the forefront, reactivating the ceremonial character of the cinematic experience.
Created & performed by Pablo Agma
Music by LeChatelier
Supported by:
AGADIC — Audiovisual Talent Grants 2024, Regional Government of Galicia
„Bandeja de Entrada“ Award, La Casa Encendida & Fundación Montemadrid
Premiere: Festival Puwerty, La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2024)
Pablo Agma (Vigo, Spain, 1997) is a filmmaker and audiovisual artist based in Vienna. His practice unfolds at the intersection of experimental cinema, performance, and the use of analog media such as 16mm, Super 8, and VHS. He is interested in the physicality of these formats and their potential to disrupt the frameworks that shape how images are produced, circulated, and perceived.
Working through a poetics of misalignment, he explores how subtle deviations in symbols, archetypes, cultural gestures, and cinematic conventions can open fissures in dominant narrative structures. These displacements often take shape through autofictional strategies mediated by error, confessions, or masking.
His work has been presented at La Casa Encendida, Cineteca Matadero, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, L’Alternativa, or Filmin.
Saturday, September 6th 2025
doors 8 PM | screening start 8:30 PM
20–30 min.
Spanish with english subtitles
Free entry / limited capacity
Reserve your spot: contact@pabloagma.com
filmkoop wien
Komödiengasse 8, 1020 Wien