I’m a filmmaker, using both video and celluloid, living in London. My work? A mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand.
My work has shown widely on film festival and gallery circuits (International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYUFF, EMAF, National Review of Live Art, Triangle France, Brooklyn Museum of Art, ICA London), and includes several award winning experimental narratives, video installation, a collaborative feature film, cinematic sketchbooks, moving image + live soundtrack performance work, etc.
A formative influence on my DIY approach comes from my experiences (from 1993-2006) as a core member and activist with the Exploding Cinema: a collective dedicated to originating alternative methods of exhibition for low-budget/artists’ film and video and related performance.
An ongoing project – the (currently) 10 part Badger series – has completed runs at the Pleasure Dome (Toronto) and Beaconsfield (London), won prizes at CUFF and FLEX, featured as pick of the festival at Fundada and EMAF, and appeared in various gallery incarnations in London, Marseille, New York, Texas + Vancouver Island.
More details about this, and me, can be found on the Video Data Bank website and here.
I currently work as a lecturer at University of the Arts London.
AND
In recent years much more of my time has been spent on words, besides scripts and performance texts.
Some of these writings have appeared recently in The Wrong Quarterly, 2HB, decomP magazinE, Leopardskin and Limes, Ink, sweat and tears, SO MUCH FOR FREE SCHOOL, ETC. (Five Years), as well as in my short story collections: ‘The Mascot Moth and several other pieces’ (2013) and ‘The Water Rabbits’ (2018).
What I’m up to is at the more experimental end of fiction writing, but like my film work is still very caught up with narrative. To help give some inkling as to what this might mean, my influences include: Eugene Ionesco, N.F. Simpson, Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, Padgett Powell, Jerome Charyn, B.S. Johnson, George Saunders, Barry Hannah, Raymond Queneau – book wise – but then there’s the moving image ones too: Raul Ruiz, J.L. Godard, Vera Chytilova, Mike Smith, Alex Bag, the Marx Bothers etc.
And the art ones of course. And the philosophy ones. And the etc. etc.
More about this, and with some further examples, here and there.
e-mail:
mistralstudios[at]hotmail.com
p.tarrago[at]wimbledon.arts.ac.uk
PAUL TARRAGÓ 
