Union Gaucha Productions is an independent film production company founded in 1997 by Brazilian born Karin Schneider and Argentine born Nicolas Guagnini. Its goal is to produce films and to collaborate with artists and professionals from different places, backgrounds, career status, viewpoints and disciplines.

Filmography

2001 Square Times

16mm film, 12 min,color

text by Emilio Ambasz

music by Paulo Vivacqua

Square Times is a film about an emblematic crossroad of New York City. From cultural and theatrical center, to wasted land of contemporary urban putrefaction, to post capitalist monument, Times Square is the locus inhabited by New York's craziest fantasies across all of the 20th century.
Shot with attention to abstract composition, Square Times is a cinematic depiction of the physicality of a reality which has become virtual via the application of new visual technology to buildings. Soundtrack is provided by contemporary electronic music and a voice over of a visionary 1969 text by the notable architect Emilio Ambasz discussing the relationship between infrastructure and superstructure that is the ultimate subject matter of the film.

2000 The Portrait of a Lady

Film installation

16mm film, color

2000 Yin Yang

Film Installation

16mm, color, loop

2000 IXX xs.XXI

16mm film, 3:40 min, color,sound

Korea is a country divided into two. In between its two parts there is a zone. Our work is an attempt to map the existing zone - the DMZ - into this other phantom zone.
Like in a strategy game, we are trying to superimpose one code into an inapprehensible reality. The code is that of the film apparatus, which is present as a whole: projector, film, light, projected image. The split, the DMZ zone, is alien to the system. We produce it, in military camouflage. An alteration on the physical level of the apparatus becames an intervention on a semiotic level. Quotation marks produce a sign, identified with a nation. Bodies that desire each other cannot fuse. Affection is confiscated.

1999 A VIda de Infra Tunga

16mm film, 12min, b&w

music by Paulo Vivacqua

A short ficcional documentary about a Brazilian artist Tunga, filmed in the paradisiacal natural setting of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The film is an attempt to unveil the artist's methodology of extracting the subject matter of his work from his derive in his own city, and from the practice of sculpture and installation as a performative activity in his own studio, located almost in the middle of the jungle that surrounds the neighborhood where he lives in the outskirts of Rio. witnessing several performances. The result was a poetic portrait, deliberately atemporal by means of the use of black and white stock and the exclusion of temporal clues such as architecture, cars, etc.
The music was specially composed by a Brazilian musician, Paulo Vivacqua, based
on electroacust.

1999 Hell's Heaven/Heaven's Hell

two b&w 16mm films of 11 minutes

each to be shown together

(Filmography of Tungas' work)

1998 The End

16 mm,

We investigated American documentaries showing Museums made on the late forties
and fifties. There was in this films an obsession with a mechanical order and
with technological superiority. Both preoccupations seemed to follow the script
of the propagandistic perception that America exercised on itself during the
Cold War. The idea of a Museum as a machine that will legitimate successive
Avant Garde systems was perfectly coherent with the notion of endless progress and victory through technological development.The idea took form: a little vignette, a multi-layered parody of some of the basic vocabulary of experimental filmaking (scratching and usage of found footage), which could also be critical of the establishment of the Museum machinery as part of the Avant Garde system (and clearly used as political propaganda).

' b&w, sound, 5 min

scratching by Eugenicus Varkulevicius.

1997/98 Phantom Limb

16 mm, 22min, b&w, silent.

Phantom Limb is a fictional documentary about the development of modernism in three different countries: Argentina, Brazil and Poland. This countries have in common the fact that they do have a particular cultural tradition, but they have never been centers. We can thus define them as Òrelative peripheriesÓ. Under this atypical cultural paradigms the system of successive breakdowns of avant-garde is replaced for an often asynchronic continuity. The film, rather than presenting a didactic thesis is a fictional construction of a possible Art History. The original works are featured in the film and they were shooted in the three different countries and manipulated, grouped and set up in a particular fashion. Scale is alliterated, and the lighting and framing are used to create or emphasize formal similarities.

Screenigs and exhibitions:

2001 A night with Union Gaucha Productions at Anthology Film Archives

2000 Espano Unibanco de Cinema, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, organized by Agora

Kwangju Biennale, Korea

Ajijic Film Festival, Mexico

Montevideo Film Festival, Cinemateca Uruguaya, Uruguay

1999 Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Anthology Film Archives, "The Secret Life of Anthology", curated by

Jonas Mekas

Gallery X, Harlem, New York, NY

Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, Argentina

1998 Artists' Space, Project Room, New York, NY

Luisa Strina Gallery & Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil

SOCINE, Museo de Arte Moderno, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil