Set in an imagined present in which a bridge spans the Strait of Gibraltar, Atlantropa mixes fact and fiction by connecting the bridge to contemporary news reports and to a modernist architect's vision: to dam the Strait and create a new continent. Originally intended as a symbol of unity between Africa and Europe, the bridge is eventually seized by EU forces and takes on a completely different meaning. The Gilbraltar Bridge, first mentioned in science fiction by Arthur C. Clarke, has more recently been investigated as an actual possibility by the United Nations.
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11 Archival description results for España
The sun does not always shine in Barcelona, the “best shop in the world” according to the slogan of a City Council campaign. The thousands of tourists who visit Barcelona every month boost the city's economy, but their social and human impact is often overlooked. The precarious nature of jobs in tourism, real estate pressure from the hotels, and the types of problems that crop up when a city turns into a kind of theme park in an attempt to seduce outsiders. The classic problems of global capitalism, reflected in one of the country's major industries... “BCN Thematic Park” talks about all this... about Barcelona, a city-advertisement that is turning into the newest theme park on the international market.
UntitledConcrete Coast is about the social, cultural and environmental effects of the last section of un-urbanized Spanish Mediterranean coast being built up for residential tourism in the Region of Murcia. Agriculture is disappearing along this 230 km stretch of coastline and being replaced by 60 golf courses, marinas, freeways and new large-scale planned communities with 1,000,000 residences, mainly for sunseeking British retirees who are set to double the population of Murcia within few years. The impacts of these large-scale economic and political forces are illustrated by a Spanish farming family having their land expropriated and a retired British couple embarking on their new life in a country where they do not even speak the language. How will all of this change the culture of the region? Will the populations integrate? Will these and other Spanish farmers have to emigrate?
Gaza, War in Media presents a series of interviews that challenge the official Spanish media account of Israel's Operation Cast Lead, in which 1,400 Palestinians died and 5,000 people were wounded, most of them civilians. According to this version, Israel was “defending itself” from the launch of Qassam rockets by Hamas, by massive bombardments to destroy the “infrastructure” of this “terrorist” group. In reality, the bombardments and the ground offensive by the Israeli army targetted the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, as shown by the Goldstone report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council.
Shot in Cameroon and Brussels, Je ne suis pas moi-même explores the world of African antiquities and the contradictions in a European art market hungry for new tribal objects. Where do the African masks come from? What journey do these masks make before their unveiling in the windows of the biggest galleries or art collections in Europe? Who determines the economic and aesthetic value of these objects now that colonialism is supposedly dead' And then there's a continent called Africa, in need of economic resources and therefore willing to sell its cultural heritage or, if need be, to fake it. The authenticity of the objects becomes blurred when the people that once adored them start to sell them.
UntitledThere is an anarchist essence inherent in Islam, which deserves our attention. Koranic cosmology states that a human being in the state of nature is a ‘slave (or serf) of Al-lâh, just as a sunflower is a slave of the sun, because they are organically linked. The concept of submission to a Single Reality (al- islam) does not translate into submission to human institutions, rather the reverse: it leads to a rejection of all external coercion as contrary to the nature of things. Muslims reject the limits that the market and the institutionalisation of life impose on their freedom, as an inner space in which intimacy with Creation becomes possible. The freedom that Muslims recognise is not political freedom under protection of the State, but an inner state/space that enables us to reject the world of representations, reject the fiction of power that some sheathe themselves in. This is based on idea that human beings are noble in essence, that their state of nature (fitrah) is superior to their state of culture. Ibn Jaldún says: “The political and educational order is contrary to the power of the soul because it embodies an instance of external control”.This point explains why Islam has been described as ‘mystical anarchy’. Abdennur Prado is a writer, president of the Catalan Islamic Council and co-director of the International Congress of Islamic Feminism.
Léxico Familiar transforms the all-encompassing intent behind the idea of a “dictionary” into a more modest attempt to compile a few elements of the “family lexicon” that constitutes the language of the new movements. As per Heinrich von Kleist's idea of gradual production of thoughts whilst speaking, this vocabulary is revealed through the course of the conversation, framing and editing, which literally seek to show how thought is embodied. Just as political concepts that lead to dynamics of change (which can be appropriated by other subjects, and which circulate so as to be verified through different practices) don't arise through isolated gestures or thought ex nihilo, but from actual experiences and specific bodies and struggles.
UntitledMapas Migrantes looks at migration in Barcelona from the period following the Civil War up until the present, through the city's buildings, infrastructures and street furniture. It is a kind of atlas, a series of maps that take shape through the voices of migrants, whose tales of the past invite us to re-read the city. Charting the invisible, we enter a territory in which individual subjectivities erase the boundaries laid down by the dominant discourse.
Untitled“The opening of a Muslim oratory in a building in Santa Coloma de Gramenet (Barcelona), for the celebration of Ramadan in October 2004 sparked a confrontation with dye intolerance among the residents of the city and the City. No Mosque! is a documentary of dialog and reflection that analyzes causes and consequences of this conflict on the basis of testimony of all of its protagonists.” We see the escalating pressure from one section of the neighborhood, the solidarity of others (the Ateneu Popular), the pathetic response of the City Council and the Muslim community's banishment to a prayer room made from shipping containers among wire fences in an Industrial Zone... A fractal that is being repeated exponentially throughout the country.
UntitledPlan Rosebud 1 is focused on the recent social debate around the so-called Historic Memory Act in Spain, and the current relation between the sites of memory and the politics of memory, and the cultural industries, studied in detail, in our case, trough the war tourism and commemorative tourism (that forms the main part of the four scenarios that this first film contains).
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