Screening on our Digital Array, John Hansard Gallery is excited to present Gerard Ortin Castellví’s film Bliss Point.
Bliss Point is the final film in Ortín Castellví’s trilogy that focuses on the food that we eat and the major transformations it continues to undertake, alongside the infrastructures of food distribution and marketing.
We are made aware of the sheer vastness of algorithm powered robots that buzz tirelessly through sprawling grids of crates to meet the demands of our food consumption.
In the same vein, late at night, a delivery driver cycles across the city to a makeshift kitchen trailer located underneath a bypass, where workers try to keep up with the demand for home delivered burgers and fries. A fox feeds from discarded food waste, as we encounter the city’s urban wildlife who forage from our food waste. We uncover food production techniques of 3D printers stacking layers of computer-generated data to produce food alternatives – Bliss Point reveals the entanglement of automation and human labour.
The term ‘bliss point’ refers to a specific amount of an ingredient such as salt, sugar or fat in order to optimise the palatability of a product. In turn, the film expands on this concept to explore the ways in which the aesthetics and the politics of food intersect. This beautifully crafted film brings to the fore the acuity of food packaging and the intricate movement of food distribution, all set to an enveloping soundscape of machinery, laboratories and human labour.
About the artist:
Gerard Ortín Castellví (b. 1988) is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher currently reading a Ph.D. at Goldsmiths University London, funded by an AHRC fellowship. His practice focuses on the relationship between moving images and the technologies and ecologies of food in the context of the current environmental transformations. He is a mentor at UCL Creative Documentary by Practice MFA, and a member of the Ecological Reparation project.