Only Rituals Can Save Us (2021)
Video
Format: 265 × 122
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2021.492.1
Only Ritual Can Save Us (2021) is an audiovisual essay situated at the intersection of autobiography, decolonial historiography, and dance. In this project, Julia Martos Ramírez draws on the experience of the Ukrainian experimental filmmaker Maya Deren in Haiti (1947–1951) to speculate on a film that Deren never completed. Imagining it involves confronting her own relationship with the filmmaker and exploring how she transfers to her situated experience the questions that led Deren to distance herself from the image.
In the essay, Martos portrays her sister while engaging with Deren’s unfinished film. The work is produced on celluloid, and the artist chose to work in Super 8 to approximate the materiality employed by Deren in Haiti. She films her sister’s dance, develops and digitizes her own films, finding a particular ritual in the process. The work constructs a triangle between her sister — a contemporary dancer with whom she has collaborated on multiple occasions since 2008 — Maya Deren, and the artist herself. Deren’s story functions as an example of the colonial system of visuality, while her figure as a dancer and filmmaker embodies a shared space between Martos and her sister. Her body — or the image of her body — becomes a site for a poetic and performative conversation.
The artist reflects on how to work with a type of archive not considered by official history — “unaligned archives,” as Léa Morin calls them — while advocating for a cinema that opens both aesthetic and political possibilities and that believes in the power of self-narration as a counter-history capable of disrupting the perpetuation of patriarchal structural frameworks. Autobiography appears as the primary means to create a shared space with the viewer, while the need to fill the gaps of an archive drives the narrative. Archives never tell absolute truth, but generously share individual truths — the ones that are analyzed: subjective truths that maintain an emphasis on completeness.
Julia Martos Ramírez was born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1989, and earned a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Granada in 2012. She also trained at the Professional Conservatory of Dance Luis del Río in Córdoba and completed a Master’s in Artistic Production at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, ultimately specializing in the audiovisual medium and developing works in video art, dance film, and video installation. In her most recent audiovisual works, she uses autobiography as a tool to channel and explore broader social realities.