Malicious Video

2025, 40’ single-channel video, as part of Malicious Copy, a project by Sara Santana.

Malicious Copy is a drawing and writing project based on the manuscript-copying practices of medieval scribes as a means of freely disseminating culture. It takes as its subject Malicious Damage (Ilsa Colsell, 2017), a book documenting the subversive actions of playwrights Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell within the Islington Public Library in the 1960s and which, currently in Madrid, can only be consulted at the library of the Reina SofΓ­a Museum and under very restricted access. The project aims to reverse this paradoxical situation by drawing inspiration from the strategies employed by Orton and Halliwell and, through collage, drawing and contaminated copying, to produce an apocryphal version of Malicious Damage that opens it up to other readers and interpretations.

The handwritten copy becomes a form of mediation, a way of passing text and image through the body, pointing to the importance of chains of transmission. Here, the categories of fake and original become more complex, as do those of vandalism, value, and ownership.

To document and show the copying process, artist Sara Santana has invited Aitana LΓ³pez Rodrigo to create Malicious Video, a piece documenting the process of copying. To do so, Aitana composed a 40-minute audiovisual work in which the background noise of Sara’s study room is transformed through the manipulation of audio frequencies, highlighting the musicality, arbitrariness, and monotony of the copying process.

Excerpt, 2025, single channel video, HD.

Malicious Copy was part of the exhibition Una flor es una flecha es una flexo es un flan es una flor, curated by Manuela PedrΓ³n Nicolau at Sala de Arte Joven in Madrid, in November 2025. The soundtrack of Malicious Video was part of the program 24 hour radio relay at WORM, Rotterdam, in January 2026.