Background

Background explores the margins of film production, bringing to the fore what happens behind the cameras.

Through unfinished sets, waiting extras and the technical elements of the set, this work documents a liminal and ephemeral space that offers a new perspective: What happens at the edge of the image?

The sets, these transitional spaces designed to make the scene believable, reveal the seams of the audiovisual illusion. As we contemplate these images, we become witnesses to what usually remains hidden, as the set becomes a character in its own right, an entity that interacts with and conditions the narrative. In this context, the ephemeral is not incidental but a means of revealing what usually goes unnoticed.

The extras, those anonymous figures whose role is to lend credibility to the fiction, are portrayed in positions where they barely interact with the main scene. They are in a state of waiting that turns them into protagonists of their own absence. Their existence is marginal but laden with meaning, as they carry the weight of the strange. Here, their waiting and invisibility reflect a parallel reality within the film set.

All fiction strives to create a perfect illusion, but in doing so, it reveals a paradox: the more artificial the set, the more convincing the fiction becomes and the more invisible its components. What is ignored—the blurred space inhabited by fleeting beings and places—forces us to question what we see, subverting established visual hierarchies. What once remained out of focus now takes centre stage, coming to life and presence, challenging the conventions of cinematic perspective.