Cinema as ‘found’ footage in experimental Argentine video

This article explores the use of cinema in Argentine artists’ videos. In an age of open access to myriad moving images, the production, distribution and consumption of films and videos have reduced their costs and become a common popular activity. This contemporary visual excess seems to be dominated by postmodern processes of citation and resignification of objects and images in circulation, taken mainly from the mass media and the Internet. Accordingly, this article aims to examine experimental Argentine video productions that not only cite but also use cinema as an inter-trans-medial dispositif and thus as a source of renewal of video art. It studies ways in which video has moved from its dialogue with television to that with the cinematographic, from addressing archives or ‘found’ footage to problematizing, in a Bourriaudian vein, the use of ‘cultural artefacts’.