Europlex tracks distinct cross-border activities through the Spanish-Moroccan borderland and seeks to make these obscure paths visible. On their repetitive circuit around the check-point to the Spanish enclave Ceuta, the video follows in three borderlogs the smuggling women who strap multiple layers of clothes to their bodies; the daily commute of "domesticas" who turn into time travellers as they move back and forth between the Moroccan and European time zones; and the Moroccan women working in the transnational zones in Northafrica for the European market. All these trajectories move around and in between the imperative of the territorial borders. They form, however, a vital layer of the cultural and economic space between Europe and Africa.

How to escape from the trap? How to fight the monster of need that makes you lose your human shape, that itch that you can?t stop thinking about and makes that you dependent, a prisoner of consumption, a slave to an artificial paradise? All these questions are taken from the books of William Burroughs, a drug addict until he finally escaped the horrors of addiction at the age of 50. In his introduction to ?The Naked Lunch?, Gérard-Georges Lemaire, referring to Burroughs, wrote: "..he was wildly interested in control techniques in the widest sense, from the Maya Code, which he discovered in Mexico, to the manipulations of the mass media, the CIA and different American sects?. William Burroughs is a tireless defensor of the free will of human beings subject to all kinds of coercive systems, some totalitarian, others more subtle, more sophisticated, that take possession of the human being through perverse and intimate channels: such as desire, for example".

On the border, the line as principle of property and belonging reaches an extreme dimension where it physically defines the sphere of its relations. Those who transgress it reconstruct these imaginary lines on a daily basis, redefining the traditional geography and occupying the non-spaces where others live in a temporary form of existence. These others, the non-citizens, are phantasmtic, exchangeable parts of a flexible market. Made invisible, they are permanently controlled persons. Under the pretext of a greater civilian security, they are kept clear from the public spaces reserved for the citizens with rights and pushed into non-public spaces, which are run by state and military surveillance, multinational operations servicing a European market and non-governmental organisations.

Observatory Archives 1999

/ CONTEXT 1994 - 2020

Observatory Archives 1999

The theme of OVNI 1999 is the journey that goes from the social to the private and vice versa, with the understanding that they are part of the same continuous fabric. Memory/Collective Fiction. Dreams/Personal Memories. Standards and archetypes and individual irreducibility. Media paranoia and stories of schizophrenia. Social passions and love stories. The “American dream”, the “European dream”. Temporary Autonomous Zones and Other Worlds.

Thematical screenings

Hall and Auditorium.  Simultaneous Screenings

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

Montalegre 5. 08001 Barcelona

Portraits of a small community, the memory, the interpretation. 6th Independent Vídeo & Interactive Phenomena Show

“There is a saying in Arabic that translates as ‘I see the stars at noon'. We use it when everything in life is turned upside-down, when things are not as they should be. I first heard it in the tiny Moroccan village of Sebt Jahjouh, travelling with a man named Abdelfattah, a man whose world was upside-down, a man for whom things were definitely not as they should have been.” In January of 2004, in the northern Moroccan city of Tangiers, Abdelfattah is one of many trying to illegally immigrate to Spain by stowing away on a cargo ship. “I See the Stars at Noon” is at times humorous and disturbing, as it intimately examines the circumstances that lead him to risk everything for an utterly uncertain future. The traditional relationship between filmmaker and subject is thrown into question when Abdelfattah asks why his life is being filmed for the benefit of European audiences, and what he deserves in return.

A cinematographic poem shot random in different parts of Morocco. It is an intimate diary of an era. An ensemble of strange and beautiful details, in constant dialogue voice over poems, people´s movement, animals, images of the city and the country side, creating a dreamlike atmosphere where the smallest detail matters. The seduction of “Something “ we might no longer have.