«… let us imagine every myth as a crystalline regular polyhedron,
suspended weightless, in a void, with each of its vertices touching,
in perfect geodesic equilibrium, the surface of an imaginary iridescent sphere.
The integrity of the whole body is utterly dependent upon the integrity of its facets,
every facet represents a story…

The Universe is but sparsely populated by these Polyhedra, enormous though they are.
Here and there a faint nebula marks, perhaps, the region where a new myth struggles to cohere;
elsewhere, dark cinders barely glow, remnants of an experience lost forever to consciousness.
A hole torn in the very fabric of space, whence no energy escapes, is rumored to mark the place
where the black Polyhedra of the Unknowable vanished.

Nor do all the facets bear images. Some are dusty, some cracked,
some are filled with senseless images of insects. or else with a vague, churning scarlet, shot with sparks.
Some are as transparent as gin. Some are bright as mirrors and reflect our own faces… and then our eyes… and behind our eyes, distantly, our polyhedral thoughts, glinting, wheeling like galaxies.»
Hollis Frampton

Louidgi Beltrame’s Fragata magnífica, magnífica fragata presents a collection of super-8 films and ink drawings on canvas related to the artist’s recent projects. The title is also that of a diptych of films of frigate-birds (fragatas) flying over the skies of Rio de Janeiro. The same sequence of images is transferred to black and white, in negative, and played in reverse to produce the second film. This simple shift produces a type of abstraction of the image, produced with the technical means of its recording and broadcast. The singular silhouettes of the birds move in opposite directions on two pedestal-mounted screens, and appear to resonate with the molecular agitation of the film grain.

A second film, Huancor (2025), shows the petroglyph-marked stones of the Huancor site in the Peruvian Andes. It is accompanied by a list of the various engraved figures written by a Cuban archaeologist, which reads and is read like a poem in the film. The other two films in the exhibition were also shot in Peru. Rose moderne (2025) consists of a series of still shots of the Inca palace of Puruchuco. The images of the site, softened by their recording on super-8 film, are surprising for the modernist simplicity of their architectural forms, occasionally punctuated by the appearance of a crane, the poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s whistling, or the chaotic profile of the surrounding Lima suburbs.

A third film entitled Pakatnamu, premonition (2025), also shot on super-8, bears witness to an uncanny disruption of its recording. Filmed in 2015, during his first visit to the Pakatnamu archaeological site while scouting for the film El Brujo (2016), the footage shows the lunar, hallucinatory landscape of the archaeological site, strewn with bones and punctuated by the holes dug by huaqueros (grave diggers). Beltrame filmed the site a first time, but his camera kept jamming. Warned by the person accompanying him of the need to make an offering to the huaca*, Beltrame returned to the site and filmed again after making the offering, this time without any disturbance. Sequences scrambled by the jamming of the camera alternate with the later immaculate clips in the film’s montage, and in its final sequence, the camera seems to flee towards the sea. Like his Vortex series, ink drawings of rays of color radiating from a central void, Pakatnamu, premonition is built around an occult presence made visible by its emanations. This presence is never named by Beltrame, who merely observes its effects, which he describes as a haunting. In the intertitles at the beginning of the film, Beltrame recounts the recording of the film, and also describes the circumstances and encounters that brought him back in 2022 to the same location in Pakatnamu to film La huaca llora (2024).

Louidgi Beltrame’s projects in Peru and elsewhere are linked by a form of research open to contingencies, drifts and deviations of all sorts. His approach is that of an artist-cinematographer who also records the textures and asperities of a situation, its relief, as in a rubbing. Following an encounter until it turns into a dialogue or collaboration, accepting the unforeseen aspects of a situation,
its jolts or outbursts, all this, far from being passive, bears witness to another form of activity, linked to listening and observation.
The wanderings of his work can thus be read as the arabesques of a research, of a constantly renewed effort to open up and mobilize other perspectives, which his audience grasps, in fleeting glimpses, from within the interstices of his nomadic, protean work.

Julien Bismuth

* a word that designates both a site and a sacred object