Have you ever recalled the sound of a film? What was the name of that movie where you could hear the slow, steady breathing of someone asleep in the foreground, with the trickle of a river in the distance? You’d probably have no trouble clearly visualising the scene in your head if you were to hear it now, as if you’d seen it before. Sound is one of the most powerful and evocative codes in cinematic language, and probably the most theatrical too.

Anyone familiar with Macarena Recuerda’s work knows that her strength lies in how she plays with stage conventions and illusions, making the smallest thing seem colossal in our perception. In this piece, that playfulness is channelled through foley, the meticulous creation of cinematic soundscapes through the manipulation and amplification of everyday objects. Everything is exactly what it is, yet in our minds, it becomes something else.

Si fuera una película isn’t quite a film, because it has no images. Instead, pictures are projected onto the fourth wall of our imagination. In the meantime, we find ourselves at a concert of objects, performed by Macarena Recuerda and George Marinov, which unfolds like a collage of sound made from scraps of our collective memory. Horror has its own sonority, as do war and love. Cinema has trained us to expect certain sound palettes that rarely match the real sound of things. But when we take away the image and look through the screen, we enter the workshop of the imagination: a strange landscape inhabited by two obstinate creatures determined to bring the fiction to life, second by second, frame by frame. Si fuera una película cannot be a film. It’s actually theatre.

To question images is an act of resistance. To make them disappear, or shape them to fit a different rhythm, is too. And out of that disappearance, new images of great expressive force can emerge. That’s what happens in this piece, and also in No ser ni la sombra de lo que se fue by María Jerez.