Laida Lertxundi, 8 Topaketa, 2021–2023. 16mm film. Courtesy of the artist.

Basque filmmaker Laida Lertxundi made her first film in California, Footnotes to a House of Love, in 2007, the same year she graduated from California Institute of the Arts with an MFA. Shot on 16mm film in and around an abandoned house in the desert she visited over a period of months, the film drew inspiration from the landscape and structuralist filmmakers who had been her teachers (Peter Hutton, James Benning), American Westerns, and the drama of the California terrain. With this film, Lertxundi established the defining themes and tensions that are central to her work—the fusion of the environment and affect, what the artist calls “Landscape Plus.”¹ I first encountered Lertxundi’s work a decade later, when I saw 025 Sunset Red (2016) in Wavelengths, the Toronto Film Festival’s avant-garde and experimental section, which was curated by Andréa Picard. By this point, Lertxundi’s oeuvre was closely associated with the Californian landscape and her status therein as an outsider. With the autobiographical 025 Sunset Red, Lertxundi situated her own subjectivity more explicitly within her film through fragments of personal creativity, intimacy, and desire alongside archival materials documenting her parents’ involvement in the Basque communist movement of the 1970s.²

In November 2022, I visited Bilbao, Spain, and Lertxundi and her partner, Ren Ebel (also an artist and frequent collaborator), invited me to join them in their home for an expatriate Thanksgiving. It was at this Basque-American table that I first heard about 8 Topaketa (Eight Encounters) (2021–23), the ambitious film project and ephemeral school that Lertxundi had conceived upon moving back to the Basque country from Los Angeles. The project involved carrying heavy analog filmmaking equipment up Basque mountainsides in all extremes of weather and terrain, accompanied by a group of collaborators working across different disciplines (Ebel, Alex Alonso Díaz, Ketevan Alexi-Mehiskivili, Clara Schulmann, Usoa Fullaondo, Keira Greene, and Sirah Badiola) and even more workshop participants.³ An experiment borne out of the isolation produced by the Covid-19 pandemic, the school provided communal and collaborative context, while the geography and topography of the region ensured the project would postulate vigorous, embodied participation. When I returned to Los Angeles, I reached out to Lertxundi to inquire about the future of the project. In response, she shared her original proposal and the syllabus that plotted the ephemeral school’s structure, as well as some of the profusion of material that had come out of the school and film shoot. In April 2023, Lertxundi and I spoke on Zoom to discuss the ambitious project and its potential lives.

Laida Lertxundi, 8 Topaketa, 2021–2023. 16mm film. Courtesy of the artist.

Kate Rouhandeh: How did you initially come to the 8 Topaketa project?

Laida Lertxundi: I moved back to the Basque country, the first landscape I had known, after being abroad for almost two decades. Immediately, I experienced a strong desire—a palpable, visceral desire—to be out in the landscape. But I couldn’t because stringent pandemic-era restrictions were enforced here in Spain. I figured the confinement to our homes would end at some point, so, since I couldn’t film, I started working on a plan for a project: 8 Topaketa. Imagined as an ephemeral school, the idea was a pedagogical, collaborative project with each encounter made up of two parts. I would invite someone to lead a workshop based on their own practice, and then we would carry something from the workshop (usually there would be readings, screenings, some performative thing we would do together, or drawing) with us to shoot in the mountains.

I had studied with Anna Halprin in Northern California when I was at Headlands [Center for the Arts]. She has this project called Experiments in Environment, and I sort of got the idea there. She would get architects, writers, artists, different people to do these experiments together. That was when I realized that the undoing of roles in my films and my training in dance and other time-based or performative practices were coming to the fore. I was very interested in the idea of the film shoot as a kind of performance and the possibility of that being the work. With a film, everything is a means to an end, but the idea that the work is the shoot really opened up for me with this project.

KR: You set out to work collaboratively and non-hierarchically. You invited a range of people from your communities—writers, artists, dancers, curators—to serve as the guest leaders of the workshops and put together a rich syllabus of readings and screenings that could take the project in so many different directions. This project was radically open-ended. Was there still an assumption that you would retain some degree of control over the situation?

LL: Creating a collaborative environment and having the crew be the cast and all of that was already there for me, but always with the assumption that I was making a single-channel film. I invited the artist guests for each of the workshops, but it was a public program, hosted by Azkuna Zentroa [the main culture and art center in Bilbao], so anyone could sign up and attend the workshops. That was really interesting and also challenging because suddenly you’re mixing in people who are coming from very different backgrounds and might have very different reasons why they’re interested in the project. That definitely felt out of hand. I have always chosen the people that I work with—who you choose to work with is such a sensitive and intuitive thing. Apparently, Robert Bresson would cast people over the phone; he felt that hearing their voice alone conveyed so much about the person. It was very extreme for me to just meet them, and then we’re working together the next day. The whole project felt like that. You stick to the planned structure, but what happens inside that structure? I didn’t have much control over it.

It’s part of an ongoing interest in undoing the way a film is traditionally made. Usually, there are specific procedures and specific technical roles, especially in Europe, where films are often made with public funds. The idea of approaching all this production without that or, in a way, disarming those mechanisms is sort of a free fall. You’re inhabiting the same space yet changing all the rules. I’ve always worked without a crew and had the people appearing in the film do all of the technical things as well. The same way that someone might feel shy about being in front of the camera, someone might feel like they don’t know how to handle something like recording sound—it’s too much responsibility. I put people who lack specialized training in these positions all the time, but I also try to make them feel comfortable. It’s about spending a lot of time together. An excursion—or in the case of 8 Topaketa, a really epic journey—suits that, because it becomes bigger than making a film. Making a film is a way for the whole experience to be had.

KR: It sounds like the exertion of climbing the mountains ultimately shaped the project in unpredictable ways.

LL: The Basque mountains are quite steep, and there’s a whole culture of mendizaletasuna [mountaineering]. It’s already a big effort just going up the mountain, and that was compounded by carrying the equipment, especially heavy analog equipment. It’s something that I take for granted because I grew up climbing these mountains. If you haven’t done it, you might freak out in the middle. Someone from Paris asked, “Where did you bring me? There’s no way I’m climbing this.” I was kind of a shepherd, saying, “We can do this, just try.”

KR: I also want to ask you about weather. I love the idea that talking about the weather is boring, because the weather is literally what we all experience with all of our senses every day. It sounds like climbing a mountain was a real reminder of the primacy of the sensory experience of atmosphere and climate.

LL: For the last shoot, it was a diluvio—raining like a sea. You are not supposed to step outside at all, not even to run an errand. We went up the mountain part way in two cars, and when we were going up the first part, people in one of the cars said, “Laida, this is crazy. We’re not getting out of the car.” There was intense resistance, and they were being reasonable. I said, “It’s going to get better. I see a little bit of blue in the distance!” Because I had to make it work that day. It was insane. The camera was wet, our feet were wet. The water was coming from everywhere. Then we got to the top, and there was a little mountain refuge that happened to have a little fire going. So we dried the insoles of our shoes. We were saved, we were able to work. There’s something about my training in California, where you can always film because the weather is always cooperating.

Laida Lertxundi, 8 Topaketa, 2021–2023. 16mm film. Courtesy of the artist.

KR: It’s interesting that you say that the weather here in California was more cooperative. In a lot of ways, it is, but the climate here also can be intense—it’s not mild. I know you have worked a lot in the desert, which is inhospitable in its own ways. Maybe with equipment, heat is not as scary as moisture. But I think you still need endurance.

LL: True. There’s an encounter with something that is probably going to surpass you. That’s something I’m very interested in—the sublime interrupted. You’re in the face of something that’s about to make everything fall apart.

KR: You brought young children on at least one of the treks. Were they able to participate? To climb the mountain? Or did they make everything fall apart?

LL: That trip was planned to be more about scripts from everyday life. When you’re with kids you can’t isolate what you’re doing—it must always be distracted, or interrupted, or in the midst of everything else that is happening. It was the hottest summer in the history of the Basque country, and the hottest it’s ever been at the top of the mountain. We were climbing the highest mountain in Bizkaia, and there were lots of reasonable doubts. But we didn’t climb to the very top. With the kids, it was risky, but they were completely into it. It was amazing—it was like they understood how I was working. It was very fluid and coalesced into playfulness.

KR: You cited Anna Halprin as an initial inspiration for this project, as well as Fluxus. Clearly dance and performance are as important to this project as filmmaking. Several of the essays in your book, Landscape Plus [Mousse Publishing, 2019], touch on the tension between your interests in structuralist filmmaking and more experiential, perhaps even “feminine,” ways of working.⁴ In Erika Balsom’s text “Landscapes of Feeling,” which discusses how these things collide for you, the phrase “form and feeling” keeps coming up.⁵ It made me think of Yvonne Rainer’s “feelings are facts”—an epithet, adage, and motto of sorts that Rainer picked up from a psychotherapist and held onto as a defense against the dominance of formalism in the art world of New York in the 1960s.⁶ As both a filmmaker and a dancer, Rainer seems like a bridge connecting filmmaking, the tradition around the Judson Dance Theater, Halprin, and their contemporaries.

Laida Lertxundi, 8 Topaketa, 2021–2023. 16mm film. Courtesy of the artist.

LL: Yeah, definitely. I studied dance in Spain, but I hadn’t found what I was really interested in. I knew I wanted to move my body and I wanted to work with my body, but here [in Spain], dance instruction was based on choreography and technique. Then I went to Bard [College] and studied dance in the context of contemporary art practice. It was very much about scores or ways of feeling and creating something formally that didn’t have to do with a certain kind of body, or knowing how to dance, or perfecting something. I also discovered the films of Yvonne Rainer at that time, which were definitely an influence. I love the use of language in her work and the ventriloquy—experimenting with what might be a character in a story. And there’s empathy and curiosity. Narrative film puts certain mechanisms into motion, but Rainer does it in a really different and much more interesting way. When I came to New York as a foreigner, I had a block with the English language. It was hard for me to think of making something where people speak a lot. Language in my films is sparse.

KR: You may have been hesitant to use a lot of language then, but the movement between languages in your work is significant. In your life and work, you are constantly navigating transitions from English to Spanish to Basque, and you also have a child who constantly moves between those languages. How do you think that has influenced your work over time?

LL: Translation is a really important part of my work. The translation of the experience of shooting to the final film. Making drawings based on narratives. There’s all this mirroring—but it is imperfect. It’s like the witches in the mountains. There’s a lot of mythology about the witches that live in these mountains. Really, the “witches” are just a way to think about what was here before Christianity. This is a very old place, and the Basque country was never fully colonized. Basque is an Indigenous language and it’s an isolated language—it doesn’t relate to any other language. That’s why it’s so difficult to learn. It’s a good metaphor for the whole region—it has an internal logic, and it doesn’t actually translate outside of itself. You can only know it from within.

When I was planning these trips, sometimes we would get a car to a place where access to the road was closed, which necessitated calling the atezaina, the person, usually a very old man, charged with maintaining and controlling access to the mountain roads. In order to speak to these stewards of the roadways, I had to be able to speak enough of a very specific regional dialect. If I didn’t accomplish that, we could not access the roads.

Laida Lertxundi, 8 Topaketa, 2021–2023. 16mm film. Courtesy of the artist.

KR: Translation also seems like a key to the way you are thinking about discipline and form. For example, the names you give the workshops reflect an intention to move between disciplines: production is “Exertion”; light is “Material Presence”; and performance is “Gesture.”

LL: One of the texts on the syllabus is Giorgio Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture.” Part of that essay is about the transition from the still image to the moving image, what it means and what each evokes that is different from the other. Agamben talks about cinema being essentially social because it captures human beings together in time—no other art form does that. For me, that’s always been there. The making of the film is about having an experience of place and people through the tools of cinema more than it is about the final outcome. This is also why I was interested in Fluxus practices—the idea that there’s a shared experience from which the work emerges.

KR: Which is like dance, too. I’d like to ask you about French-Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz’s essay “For a Shamanic Cinema.”⁷ You mentioned that you have used this when teaching, such as when you made Words, Planets (2018) with your students at Art Center College of Design. Did Ruiz’s idea of shamanic cinema help you to formulate the pedagogical and creative models of 8 Topaketa?

Laida Lertxundi, 8 Topaketa, 2021–2023. 16mm film. Courtesy of the artist.

LL: That essay is so replete with meaning, and really became a propeller for this project. It made me think of cinema as the working space rather than an end-product or final outcome. There’s something in that essay about narrative shapes—like the shape of a lemon or other object. Working with my students, we would watch films and make drawings of what we thought the shape of the narrative was. It’s all a kind of transmutation or act of translation through different media, in response to a work. I taught a class last week at the university here that had a similar intent. I planned a screening, and I asked the students to bring texts that they had written. I invited them to read them at any point, in between the films or during the films. It created this very interesting space that was both a screening and a class. It was also a live performance that changes as it goes. I feel like that came from [Ruiz’s essay] too. The objective of making a film and how you go about it, and even how you watch films, can be undone by these performative practices and other parameters.

For me, Ruiz was a counterpoint to a lot of American formalist filmmaking—he had this completely different voice, from Chile, that’s very anti-minimalist. [For Ruiz], more is more. If you want to be experimental, you don’t get rid of narrative, you just put in more. And you don’t know what’s going on, because there are twenty narratives! In a different essay from that book, he’s sort of making fun of experimental films, mainly American, that are too formalist, clarifying that he’s not advocating for “pure, clear vegetarian films or even worse, as healthy films: films showing nothing but landscapes, chemical reactions, animals bored to death at nightfall.”⁸ That’s boring. He wants all these anachronistic and maximalist things to happen. I don’t know what he would think of this project—if it would be too “vegetarian” for him. Too many cows grazing. But, I aimed to apply the Ruizian way here—the exploding open of a film practice, creating a monster with all of these different people working collaboratively, and the coming and going of context and materials.

KR: Given the radical nature of this collaboration, how are you thinking about presenting a final piece?

LL: It’s very open. I am thinking of making a book, because there’s so much material that is not film—writing, drawings, photos, lists. It’s not just the texts themselves; the papers are soiled and have lots of different handwriting—there’s all of this texture. There’s also the footage, which I think is really great as a document. But it’s only part of what happened or what was created.

KR: Sometimes I think that printed matter can capture the range of elements that make up moving image work better than screenings and exhibition spaces. Like Landscape Plus—the reader has to physically change the orientation of the book to engage with it.

Laida Lertxundi, 8 Topaketa, 2021–2023. 16mm film. Courtesy of the artist.

LL: I have been invited to contribute the film to a biennial. It’s possible that it will be in a big exhibition space and it won’t be dark. I was thinking of Frances Stark. When she made My Best Thing (2011), she was sure that nobody was going to watch a long film, so she made a ten-minute segment. I’m already thinking of making a ten-minute version, because who’s going to sit down and watch it in an exhibition space for the entire fifty minutes? I guess what’s still interesting is the question: Where is the work? Can a ten-minute edit really be the work? Or is everything that came before it the real work?⁹

KR: That question of where the work is really resonates with the idea that you started referring to this project as “school,” because it recenters the process.

LL: I started reading this book, The Baby on the Fire Escape, by Julie Phillips, which I’m really into. There’s a figure of the artist for whom making work is a means to an end. Phillips writes, “So the artist might be in the midst of family life but obsessively at work, like Henri Matisse whose painting pulled him into a ‘vortex.’ ‘He could think of nothing else,’ his daughter said. The creator might be an ‘art monster,’ Jenny Offill’s term for the creator who lives only for the work.”¹⁰ I was thinking about the idea of the “art monster.” It’s so unappealing. I’m interested in opening up this process, which is not a means to an end. It’s a means to a means.

Laida Lertxundi is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Paris. Entangling the sublime and the critical, Lertxundi’s 16mm films capture collective, improvised gestures and diegetic sound events within a variety of natural landscapes to produce a deeply embodied, sensual formalism. Lertxundi’s work is invested in landscape as both an artistic tradition and a particular set of regional characteristics, idioms and inhabitants — from the deserts of California to the dramatic mountains of her native Basque Country. She is currently a Professor at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.

Kate Rouhandeh is a writer, independent curator, and editor living in Los Angeles. She currently works at the Michael Asher Foundation and is managing editor at X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal.