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

In Dakar, a disturbing friendship between the filmmaker Khady Sylla and Aminta, two women who are caught in depression or madness. A moving mirror portrait that attempts to express an inescapable desperation.

Archivo de Proyectos 1994-2026

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                                    SOBRE PAJAROS Y VISIONES
                                     
                                    Imagenes Previstas
                                    Abrir la visión
                                    No solo un cambio.
                                    Migra Visions 2.0
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        Toni Serra  *)  Abu Ali
        / TONI SERRA *) ABU ALI

Los hatillos de trigo esconden los pinchos del azufa

Toni Serra *) Abu Ali

/ VIDEO ESSAY 2001-2016 /

/ THE BLACK TAPES / TV CODE /

/ EL HAMDULILLAH TAPES * PIRATE UTOPIAS & EUROPEAN RENEGADOES /

/ THE RAIN IN DUAR MSUAR /

Entre el Agora y la Frontera

Toni Serra *) Abu Ali

/ TONI SERRA *) ABU ALI

The sheaves of wheat hide the thorns of the jujube... drops of blood are sown in the dust

the woman's belly enters full moon... announcing a still-distant October

the harvest is a time of Remembrance, of gratitude.

The Purple Meridians III

The Purple Meridians III

Over the past two years, a total of 19 filmmakers based in the three countries have met, online and in person, to discuss obstacles they face as women and non-binary people in the audiovisual industry, to exchange ideas and resources, and to create together.

Preparations are underway in Italy , Turkey , Catalonia and the Basque Country for the third edition of The Purple Meridians 2023 , with the Gender Equality sponsorship by Eurimages .

This year, the project will have its public and main event at the Durango Book-Music-Cinema Fair on 7 December . Durango is a city in the Basque Country and has been chosen by the organizers of The Purple Meridians to expand even further – as is the purpose of this project – the connections among women filmmakers in Europe and beyond.

The choice of the Basque Country was therefore a ‘natural’ development as Basque filmmakers followed the first two Purple Meridians albeit ‘from a distance’. The program in the Basque Country will be possible thanks to the collaboration with the Durango Book Fair and Suargi Elkartea.

Two main themes would be the focus of this third event:

the difficulties, responses, proposals for women in the audiovisual industry to conjugate work and care work (maternity, care of children, care of elderly, care of ill partner/family member etc) and for women with disabilities.

These two themes will be discussed in a 2-session conference in Durango to be held on 7 December 2023.

Two filmmakers directly and most affected by this situation will be leading the discussion, Lisa Çalan and Ahu Ozturk . The two filmmakers, both Kurdish, will work with Basque filmmakers (who are exploring these issues in their films and who this year will be presenting a manifesto about ‘care’), as well as with the other filmmakers of The Purple Meridians (from Italy and Catalonia), not only in exposing the problems, but also in proposing answers, keeping in mind that one of the pillars of The Purple Meridians project is creating networks among women filmmakers in different countries.

The speakers will be:

Lisa Çalan, Ahu Öztürk (from Turkey, TPM), internationally acclaimed Basque actress Itziar Ituño (La Casa de Papel), Basque directors Ainhoa Olaso (winner of the Aukera program) and Estibaliz Urresola (awarded in Berlin 2023), Catalan director Lara Vilanova (TPM), Italian director Claudia Tosi (TPM), Argentine scriptwriter based in Belfast Luciana de Mello , Lebanese director Mary Jirmanus Saba , Kurdish director Sevinaz Evdike (Women Filmmakers Collective Kezi), and director Elli (Post Collective - Buriatia, Greece, Syria, Belgium).

The day will be accompanied by the screening at Irudienea (12:30h-13:30h) of Estibaliz Urresola's short film, Cuerdas , and a Work in Progress by Mary Jirmanus Saba.

At 19:00 h, the filmmakers will present to the press a summary of the conference's work.

The press conference will feature also an intervention by a Palestinian filmmaker.

A captivating message for dark times

Music is there to be made 1

Void and music in the West

The Black Antisol - //Silence in the awakening of the worlds//

Invitation to the film-trance: Research project & Live Cinema with Vincent Moon

To interrupt the noise of the world, to be receptive, to listen, to open to the co-animation of the world.

An exploration, a week of sound encounters, with a live cinema or film trance session at the CC Convent Agustí.

Faced with the monotonous and maddening barbarism of the media and the networks that make us see without seeing, that simplify reality by reducing it to spectacular events and violence, Vincent Moon invites us to stop the machines and go out to meet each other.

To interrupt the noise of the world, not to escape from the horror of the ongoing war or from the clear perception of a civilisation advancing towards the abyss.

Vincent Moon , independent filmmaker and sound explorer, who has been travelling the world for twenty years, will spend a week travelling with us between Barcelona and the mountains of the Pyrenees, encountering known and unknown music, and an invisible art of living and resisting.

The way we show the world helps to change the way we see it, changing the way we look helps to change a world flooded with images.

Vincent Moon says: "I long to rediscover, to rework a link with ancestral tonalities and rhythms, forms of trance...". From the Dhikr (remembrance) of Sufi tariqas in Chechnya, Ethiopia or Turkey; to months in the interior of Brazil or Peru, or incursions in Jakarta, Argentina or Morocco: "A kind of experimental ethnography, trying to hybridise all these genres of trance and music in different parts of the world (...) I think we are recording to gain a certain complexity (...) To reinvent life today we have to elaborate new forms of imagery. And it's very simple. You have to go out into the encounter (...) You break down the barriers to the encounter with the body more than with knowledge. This is what travelling taught me, to trust the memory of the body more than the memory of the brain. Respect is a step forward.

A poetic approach to the everyday. Exploring rhythm and tonality in the sound and visual resonance between beings and elements and things.

"Encounter is the fundamental thing. Meeting people, like the Troubadours (...) Film is an excuse to create a very special moment in the present, in the reality of now".

The Australian Aborigines used to say that "everything slumbers beneath the surface of the earth waiting to be called". - On the acoustic and visionary journey with Vincent Moon we go out to meet voices that continue to sing among the ruins, calling into existence another life, another reality, another truth.

"When I arrive at a place, I ask myself what is important to film today?" - Vincent Moon's visit is twofold: on the one hand to explore some experiences that are "important to film today"; on the other hand, a moment of encounter and projection in Barcelona, with his Live Cinema or Film-Trance - sound and visual exploration.

Vincent Moon's work connects with one of the investigations opened at the Unidentified Video Observatory : Silence in the awakening of worlds . At first, this research started from taking the visionary experience seriously and investigating the ways in which it unfolds, through the cracks of this world, from Surrealism to the current decline of naturalist secularism. In a second moment, which we have called first, during the immersion in the materials: The Mirror of the Night ("Mirrors: no one has yet described, knowing it,/ What you are in your being,/ You, like interstices of time,/ Filled only with holes of sieve. / You, still wasters of the empty room,/ At the hour of twilight, vast as forests..."); and now, at the moment of exposure and encounter: The black anti sun , which starts from taking seriously Rilke's intuition in the Sonnets to Orpheus: "Gesang ist Dasein" (To sing is to exist) .   

«"But the great black anti-sols, wells of truth in the essential weft, in the grey veil of the curved sky, come and go and suck each other in, and people call them ABSENCES" (René Daumal).  These splendours, the aim of the human being is to collect them (...). And it is precisely by fighting against the inertia of the body and the sleep of the soul, by practising techniques of awakening - physical awakening, spiritual awakening - a kind of "long, immense and thoughtful alteration of all the senses", that allows us to overcome the material and spiritual order of this world, in short, by leading a counter-life» (Jacques Lacarrière, Les gnostiques ).

The shadows of screams climb beyond the hills. It has happened before. But this will be the last time. The last few sense it, withdrawing deep into the forest. They cry out into the black, as the shadows pass away, into the ground.

From the series Fez Ciudad Interior. Silences and wind in the olive trees, contemplation, labyrinths and dreams. Abdelfettah Seffar, a craftsman who lived in London for years and decided to return, talks about Fez, a veiled city, and reflects of the West and its conflicts.