Two films that are presented as unpublished by the Barcelona architect Ricardo Bofill (1939-2022), recently discovered in his archive, will be exhibited in the twenty-second edition of the Documenta Madrid festival, which will be held next week, from May 6 to 11. It’s about City image (1967), who co -directed with his colleague Oscar Tusquets, and Architectural hallucination (1967), signed with Peter Hodgkinson and Xavier Bagué, both of his partners in the architecture workshop.
They were the times of the school of Barcelona, local reflex of the French Nouvelle Vague, which wanted to break the speech of a certain Spanish neo -realism, through an informal and free practice of the cinematographic story.
Image of the city, of 18 minutes, opens with frames of a young tusquets dancing disinhibited
City image 18 -minute, it opens with frames of a young tusquets dancing uninhibited, and is co -starring serene vegan or Beatriz de Moura, with appearances, among others, from Salvador Clotas, wearing gabardina and sunglasses in a secondary role. These images are mixed with others from Barcelona, filmed from a Citröen 2-CV in progress. For example, of a dirty pedrera, with filled and items for smokers in their ground floor; of trucks parked on battery on the sidewalk in Paseo Picasso, next to the Born market, then still operational; of the Ramblas, La Boquería without tourists, the port and the train stations. All this in a revoltillo of unequivocal Pop Popus, where fragments of television ads are combined with photos of the Twiggy model, by Teresa Gimpera, Rafaela Aparicio or Ursula Andress, comic vignettes and sequences of Charlot movies. This piece is a speech.
In Architectural hallucination 17-minute, the presence of Vergano is also constant, this time intertwined with images of Bofillian works, from the Barcelona of the streets Bach or Master Pérez-Cabrero, to Xanadú, in Calpe, when I was still under construction.
‘Architectural hallucination’
Bofill’s known film production focused so far on two works. On the one hand, Schizo (1970), 75 minutes subtitled documentary “A fictional report on brain architecture”, in which the relationship between art and madness is addressed. And also the shortest Circles (1966), 24 minutes, an exploration of certain geometric shapes from Roman buildings such as coliseum or pantheon.
Image of the city (1967)
Known sources from the Bofill Archive indicate that you have recently recovered footage from two other works of the architect and its team, related, respectively, with its project, not built, the city in space, in Moratalaz, and with an agricultural town in the Algerian desert, which was built. With part of these materials, Héctor Civera has made the assembly Mirage which will also be presented in Documenta Madrid.
