The urban and social structure of neighbourhoods in the medina is one of vast intricacy and complexity, being organized around a series of vital establishments for the everyday life of their inhabitants, such as the hammam or public baths, the bakery, schools and the foundouk, or caravanserai. Communal bakeries provide the heating for the public baths or hammam, fully active establishments that are very important for the cohesion of the city's social fabric. Foundouks are establishments where visiting merchants traditionally stayed and stored their products overnight. Most have now lost their original function and are adapted for other uses, such as dwellings or workshops.
Ritual
36 Archival description results for Ritual
The sacrifice. The lessons of death, its open spaces. Video Serie: El Hamdulillah Tapes * Pirate Utopias & European Renegadoes.
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
"In 1996, I was staying in the village of Mankien in South Sudan to film the war which was taking place. At the time, I thought that making a film about an area struggling with such a severe conflict would almost have to be an act of duty. Once there, the reality appeared completely different from what I initially imagined it would be. The war that was all around me was not only a struggle between an oppressive government and a downtrodden minority but a latent conflict driven by power and economic interests. Back in Belgium, I felt overwhelmed by a strong feeling of helplessness and disillusionment to the point of never showing these images, up to now. A short while ago, I was told that the village of Mankien had been subjected to a massacre orchestrated by the Khartoum government with more than the slight complicity of Western oil companies. Closed District is not only a film about the war in South Sudan, but more about wars in general, about the death and distress that often ensues. It also raises the question of the filmmaker's place in a situation of conflict". (Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd)
UntitledChinese Ghost Story is a poetic essay in which history and landscape converge to explore the construction of the railroad where 1,300 Chinese laborers lost their lives. There are no stories without places, and places are largely silent to what occurs. The retelling of Pu Songling's (1640-1715) “Kon-Sun-Ju-Liang” sets the counterpoint for this tale of the 1869 Transcontinental Railroad. Throughout the American West, we searched for those absent from the 19th century A.J. Russell photograph documenting the joining together of the eastern and western United States.
UntitledVideo Concerning the Arab World
TransArab Itinerant 2003-2005
2003 / 2005 / 2006 / 2009 - TransArab
Video Concerning the Arab World
This programme is not intended to provide an overview of independent video in Arab and Islamic countries, nor does it seek to be representative in any way.
The works being presented, like the programme as a whole, reflect the notion of “slices of reality”, in the sense that they are subjective visions, aware of their partiality, which do not exclude contradiction or conflict. Visions that perceive a strong tension on their surface and take up these eddies of confusion and violence as cause for urgent reflection and knowledge.
Images and stories, realities in themselves, rhizomatic realities: interwoven without a centre or a fixed meaning. And for that very reason, instead of giving rise to cultural dualism based on opposition, they engender a web of underground connections.