Theory and practice of care

"Loneliness is on the rise. "Mainstream discourse hides the fact that the ‘normal’ situation of a 40-hour working week, plus daycare, plus grandma for tricky times, does not just leave room for improvement, it is downright unacceptable.”

Carolina del Olmo, where is my tribe?

In Sweden – an extreme case of Western trends within the Protestant tradition –, over 50% of the population live alone. People also die alone, forgotten by everyone, after a lifetime of pursuing the desire for personal independence, adapting to social norms, comforts, and socialisation without physical contact. The dream of an independent life, free from community bonds and patriarchal family ties, has turned out to be a nightmare of loneliness, sadness, and existential emptiness.

We need to overcome the binary oppositions that lead us to choose between two almost equally bad options. We don’t have to go back to the old, strictly patriarchal family, but we shouldn’t have to settle for metropolitan solitude either. The idea is to create and experiment with other ways of living and loving.

"According to anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, female lab rats locked in cages with only their young for company started to behave in a manner very similar to 1950s American housewives, with their obsessions and their neuroses. But when observed in the wild, mothers and their offspring showed a wide range of different behaviours in all kinds of social contexts."

                                                                                                                                                             Carolina del Olmo, Where is My Tribe ?

In the documentary The Swedish Theory of Love , a Swedish social worker investigating the growing number of people who die abandoned, completely isolated, asks: “What does it matter if I have a million in the bank if I am not happy?” But it’s not just about achieving happiness, it’s about the immense somnambulant sadness washing over a decaying civilization, where life unfolds in the midst of the epiphany of a mountain of waste. “ Did you hear that? It is the sound of your world collapsing ,” say the Zapatistas. Individual independence is the catastrophic ideal of a world that is perfectly organised and efficient but cold as ice.

“ At the end of independence there is no happiness. At the end of independence there is the emptiness of life, the insignificance of life, and utter, unimaginable boredom.”

                                                                                                                       Zygmunt Bauman, interviewed in The Swedish Theory of Love

"Imaginary Trips I" is a Portrait of a City where the different languages that inhabit the urban landscape intersect. The travel document through the subjective story, the history and the dislate, whose roots are the narrations about remote cultures and unknown territories: literary genre of seekers of fortune, sailors and anthropologists. In this first chapter of "Imaginary Travels", a tour of the city of Buenos Aires, its history and myths. 3 Mostra de Vídeo Independent de Barcelona 1996.

Nievell Zero - Fundació Suñol - Act 34

Opening: Thursday 21st, July, 7:30 pm

The works selected for Act 34 at Nivell Zero focus on analysing the concept of the city as a diverse, living, alternating phenomenon. Seen through this prism, the other city is an imagined, dreamed, stifled, revolutionised, abandoned place that eschews the neoliberal paradigm of the metropolis as a stage for doing business and disdains the identical, cloned theme-park cities found in so many places across the world.

The six works featured in the show shine a torch into the dark corners of cities such as Barcelona, Cairo, Casablanca, Marseille, Naples and Beirut.

Each video will be screened as a looped projection at Nivell Zero on a given day of the week. In parallel, visitors can also watch eight documentaries from OVNI Archives, on demand on two computers in the gallery.

Calendar of screenings:

Morning screenings: 11am-12am-1pm / Afternoon screenings: 4pm–5pm–6pm-7pm

BARCELONA > Port Trade Portrait . David Batlle. 2014. Spain. OV in Catalan with English subtitles. 37’

Morning screenings: 11am-12am-1pm / Afternoon screenings: 4pm–5pm–6pm-7pm

CAIRO > Erhal [Leave] . Marc Almodóvar. 2011. Egypt/Spain. OV in Arabic with Spanish subtitles. 55′

Morning screenings: 11am-12:30am / Afternoon screenings: 4pm-6pm

CASABLANCA > Des Murs et des Hommes . Dalila Ennadre. 2013. Morocco/France. OV in Arabic with Spanish subtitles. 82′

Morning screenings: 11am-12:30am / Afternoon screenings: 4pm-6pm

MARSEILLE > La Raison du Plus Fort . Patric Jean. 2003. France. OV in French with Spanish subtitles. 83’

Morning screenings: 11am-12:30am / Afternoon screenings: 4pm-6pm

NAPLES > In Purgatorio . Giovanni Cioni. 2009. Italy. OV in Italian with Spanish subtitles. 69′

Afternoon screenings: 4pm–5pm–6pm-7pm

BEIRUT > Ça sera Beau. From Beyrouth with Love . Waël Noureddine. 2005. Lebanon/France. OV in French with Spanish subtitles. 30′

https://www.fundaciosunol.org/en/exposicion/acte-34-la-ciutat-altra-arxius-ovni/

https://www.fundaciosunol.org/en/exposicion/acte-34-la-ciutat-altra-arxius-ovni/

The result of over five years of Super 8 and 16mm filming on New York City streets, Lost Book Found melds documentary and narrative approaches into a complex meditation on city life. The piece revolves around a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive lists of places, objects, and incidents. These lists serve as the key to a hidden city.

Suburbia, and all it promises, has become the American Dream. But as we enter the 21st century, serious questions are beginning to emerge about the sustainability of this way of life. With brutal honesty and a touch of irony, The End of Suburbia explores the American Way of Life and its prospects as the planet approaches a critical era, as global demand for fossil fuels begins to outstrip supply. Are today's suburbs destined to become the slums of tomorrow?

There are two characters in The Cruise, director Bennett Miller's documentary debut: tour guide Timothy Levitch and New York, the city that barely contains his seemingly-boundless energy. This is not, however, a New York that can be found anywhere but on the screen of this black-and-white motion picture. It is a stylized, surreal window onto the city as Levitch sees it - a place where the past and the present collide, where lore is more important than historical accuracy, and where sexual gratification can be obtained by gazing at the ornate side of a building.

While the housing bubble was deflating across the US, an explosion of demolition and construction was steadily transforming Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Open House documents the brutal nature of the development spree which occurred as a result of the neighborhood's re-zoning from light manufacturing/residential to the loosening of codes that allowed for forty-story towers on the waterfront. This video chronicles a neighborhood being literally torn apart by outside developers capitalizing on a frenzied housing market, and locals under pressure to “sell out” while the price is right.

Four families who live in Bon Pastor, a Barcelona neighbourhood, refuse to leave their single-storey houses. Some refuse because they've lived there for their whole lives, others because they feel they've been duped by the Board of Housing. This video shows the action carried out by the support group “Asemblea de Apoyo a Bon Pastor” in solidarity with the four families who resisted, at a time when it is seen as “politically incorrect” to ask for what you believe is right.