Tender family nightmares, solitude and aimless drifting.

Conversations between house maids in Mexico City.

We follow the director's camera into the kitchens and living rooms of a community of Moroccan women. inside the walls of their apartment in Casablanca's old Medina, the women cook, clean, take care of their families and help each other. With their hands in the dough, in the soap whilst washing the laundry, doing the house chores, in the market or at the hammam, between laughter and tears ("We are housewives, that's all. ... Our sport? House cleaning!"). These courageous women, proud of their role, talk about their miserable lives with a great sense of awareness, but without self-pity. They show a surprising vitality, curiosity for life and solidarity. These house-proud housewives may not all know how to read, but they know exactly what would improve their lives: equal rights for women and men, more money, and a better future for their children so they wouldn't have to emigrate to support the family. A sense of hope and the possibility of change radiate out of the everyday lives of these heroines ("batalett").

“Do not be sad, my son, you are destined to fall in love.” An intervention-reading of a concert by Egyptian musician Abdelhalim el Hafiz, performing The Fortune Teller by the poet Nizar Qabbani. "My son you are 10 years old, I look at the life you have ahead of you and today it gives me vertigo. But it is not fair, perhaps because I am seeing it from my decline, I no longer have the drive that is becoming strong in you now, that is growing every day; this whirlwind of dust, but also of beauty that will take your life, like ours, like a leaf in the wind. Perhaps it was you and Yasmin who recently crossed the dense city sky... I remember as if it were yesterday in the wastelands, you picked up a translucent stone that shone in the sun when you showed it to me and now I know that you are that star you were holding in your hands".

A view of Las Vegas in the 1950s. Casinos and nuclear tests uncover the dark side of the American dream. 3 Mostra de Vídeo Independent de Barcelona 1996.

Observatory Archives 2000

/ CONTEXT 1994 - 2020

Observatory Archives 2000

OVNI 2000 brings toughener a series of works which we hope may serve as a plural and multifaceted reflection on the notion of COMMUNITY, understood not as ideal, a closed and defined paradigm, but as a reality: spaces for social, anthropological, cultural and emotional relationships where we already find ourselves, irrespective of the acceptance, participation or conflict we develop within tem.

COMMUNITY as a key reality, often hijacked, transformed by media, caricatured by states, by markets and ideologies. The “community” in this way is separated from the necessities of day to day chores and realities. Singularities, unique people are kept from forming communities unless the declare conformity to ab identity, or pertain to a group. Instead masses od individuals are constructed, eliminating, however, whats is always alive underneath, what remains of a people, indescribable, without a nam, without boundaries, whose lack of definition gives it its force and its grace. (1)

(1) Contra el hombre Agustin Garcia Calvo. Fundació Anselmo Lorenzo. Madrid, 1996 . La Comunidad que viene. Giorgio Agamben. Pre-Textos. Valencia 1996 .

Thematical screenings

Hall and Auditorium.Simultaneous Screenings

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

Montalegre 5. 08001 Barcelona