NOTE: This text derives from our call to a conversation about artistic practices, extended to each participant of the workshop that was organized in the context of the project’s Co_Lab #2. Due to logistical reasons, we were not able to sit together with Pol Merchan and hold a recorded conversation that we would later transcribe, revise, send to Pol for approval, and publish on the website. Instead, we asked Pol to react to a few general questions about his work in writing. This text is a result of his response.

My artistic practice combines research, writing, and audiovisual production, driven by a desire to create a dialogue between thought and matter. Methodologically, my work is informed by queer, trans, crip, and feminist theories, as well as by forms of embodied knowledge and attentive listening.

I am interested in experimenting with both analogue and digital media, testing their possibilities and limitations while creating works that often blur the boundaries between the biographical and autobiographical, and between genres such as the essay, documentary, and fiction. Through this practice, I seek to forge intergenerational connections by revisiting artists’ lives and works, foregrounding oral histories, and challenging linear conceptions of time.

This artistic practice complements my work as a programmer for Xposed Queer Film Festival and, more recently, as a member of the selection committee for the Panorama section of the Berlinale. Coming from a visual arts background, I consider my education in filmmaking largely self-directed—shaped through film viewing, collaborative programming, and artistic exchange rather than through formal cinematic training. This has allowed me to approach moving images with a certain freedom, unburdened by established methodologies and conventions.

I studied Fine Arts in Barcelona, focusing on photography and sculpture, while also attending numerous seminars on documentary and experimental cinema. During those years, I encountered films that profoundly influenced me, including the videotapes of Sadie Benning and the Super 8 films of Iván Zulueta. At the same time, I worked in an independent video store, spent countless hours in cinemas, and regularly visited a small underground archive specialising in horror and science fiction, filled with pirate copies and obscure cinematic rarities.

Several years later, while completing the Art in Context programme at the Berlin University of the Arts, I became immersed in artistic communities working across experimental filmmaking, post-pornography, BDSM culture, and DIY practices. It was during this period that I began producing my own audiovisual works. This unusual constellation—situated somewhere between academia, underground cinema, queer subcultures, and dungeon spaces—continues to form the foundation of my artistic practice.

My projects, “Pirate Boys” and “The Garden of Fauns,” emerge from a desire to establish dialogues with artists, artworks, and biographies across different times and creative universes. I see my work as part of a lineage of artists who engage in conversation with their predecessors—an imagined tradition born from a need for self-recognition, kinship, and community-building. By revisiting the knowledge, experiences, and cultural legacies of those who came before us, I seek to contribute to the creation of more liveable presents and futures.

In my work, Laura U. Marks’ notion of haptic visuality is particularly significant. I am drawn to the tactile qualities of analogue film—especially 16mm and Super 8—and to the ways in which grain, unstable focus, scratches, and cuts can evoke a sensory mode of perception that exceeds representation. Marks describes haptic visuality as a form of seeing in which the eyes function as organs of touch:

“Haptic cinema appeals to a viewer who perceives with all the senses. It involves thinking with your skin, or giving as much significance to the physical presence of an other as to the mental operations of symbolization.”1

“Haptic perception is usually defined as the combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies. In haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch.”2

This understanding of perception resonates deeply with my approach to artistic research. I try to engage archives, materials, biographies, and places through a tactile, sensual, and attentive gesture—allowing myself to be affected by them and, in turn, responding through the creation of a work. Rather than imposing a predetermined form or meaning, I attempt to accompany the people, materials, and histories that appear in my films. Through attentive listening and a willingness to remain open to uncertainty, I seek to create conditions in which unexpected connections and meanings can emerge.

During the Vienna workshop (October 2024), I discussed how my artistic practice is informed by disciplines that exist beyond the field of art, particularly Feldenkrais and Vedic meditation. The Feldenkrais Method is a form of somatic education that uses movement to cultivate bodily awareness, coordination, and ease. By directing attention towards physical sensation and habitual patterns, it offers tools for reorganising both bodily and mental processes.

Alongside this, I have maintained a daily Vedic meditation practice for more than seven years. This practice has helped me develop greater focus, resilience, and openness towards uncertainty, while supporting a deeper and less fearful process of self-exploration. Creative processes can be physically, emotionally, and mentally demanding; making a work often involves moving through periods of excitement, frustration, doubt, discovery, and pleasure. These practices help me navigate such experiences, allowing me to remain present even when the process feels overwhelming or unknowable.

What I find particularly meaningful in Vedic meditation is that it is not oriented towards achieving a specific result. While experiences may arise during meditation, the emphasis is placed on maintaining a regular practice and allowing its effects to manifest elsewhere, often unexpectedly. I try to apply a similar principle to artistic work: to commit to the process, to make the work, and to allow it to become what it needs to become rather than forcing it into a predetermined form.

The idea for “Pirate Boys” emerged from the work of Del LaGrace Volcano, and more specifically from a photograph of Kathy Acker titled “Twirl,” which opens the film. In the image, Acker reveals the scars left by a double mastectomy. When I first encountered that photograph, I knew very little about Acker’s life or work. Yet something in the image immediately resonated with me: I began to see a connection between the scars on the body and the cuts on the page produced through the cut-up technique that shaped much of Acker’s writing. That encounter became the starting point for a deeper immersion into the worlds of both Kathy Acker and Del LaGrace Volcano. At the same time, I felt an increasing desire to create a visual language capable of reflecting my own experiences and the queer and trans communities to which I belonged in Berlin. The resulting film can be understood as a loose homage to Acker’s novel “Pussy, King of the Pirates” (1996), excerpts of which are recited in the film using Acker’s own recorded voice.

Featuring friends, lovers, performers, and myself, Pirate Boys became a collective portrait of a chosen family and a particular moment in Berlin’s queer underground. Looking back, I feel that the film possesses a certain rawness and freshness often associated with first works—a willingness to experiment and to embrace imperfection.

The film was shot on Super 8 using a very limited number of film rolls due to the high cost of the material. In many cases, there was only a single take for each scene, and almost everything that was filmed ended up in the final edit. I was drawn to Super 8 not only for its aesthetic qualities but also because of its history. Originally developed in the 1960s for domestic and family use, it carries strong associations with intimacy, memory, and everyday life. This felt particularly meaningful in a film centred on chosen family and communal experience. I remain interested in how analogue film foregrounds its own materiality, creating a resonance between medium and subject matter.

“The Garden of Fauns” intertwines queer history, Barcelona’s urban landscape, and the political transformations of contemporary Spain. The project emerged from a desire to reconnect with my Catalan origins after spending more than a decade living in Berlin, while also exploring queer genealogies and the cultural legacy of Spain’s Transition through art, memory, and oral history.

My research began with a return to Jean Genet’s “The Thief’s Journal” (1949), a semi-autobiographical novel inspired by the author’s experiences in Barcelona and the lives of queer people inhabiting the city’s Raval district. Early in the process, I came across an illustration by the Barcelona-based artist and comic-book author Nazario that referenced Genet’s “Funeral Rites” (1947). I realised that both Nazario’s work and my own artistic interests were deeply indebted to Genet’s writings and his exploration of desire, marginality, and freedom.

This discovery led me to contact Nazario, initiating a series of conversations, encounters, and eventually the desire to create a film with him. The resulting work functions both as a portrait of the artist and as a love letter to Barcelona—a city whose histories, contradictions, and imaginaries are inseparable from the film itself. While less autobiographical than “Pirate Boys,” “The Garden of Fauns” remains deeply personal through its exploration of cultural inheritance, belonging, and identification.

The film was shot on 16mm film. On one level, I chose the format for its visual qualities and its ability to approach the richness and sensuality of Nazario’s paintings and drawings. On another, the decision reflected a desire to establish a material connection with earlier generations of artists and filmmakers who worked with the same medium.

Throughout the film, my voice reads excerpts from Nazario’s intimate diaries, creating a bridge across generations. This act of speaking through another person’s words produces a complex mixture of proximity and distance. While aspects of Nazario’s life resonate strongly with my own experiences, others belong to a different historical and cultural context. The film inhabits this tension, exploring both affinity and difference while acknowledging the ways in which previous generations have shaped the conditions of possibility for our present lives.