Son[i]a #400
Juan Bufill
Juan Bufill is a poet, experimental filmmaker, scriptwriter, photographer, critic, and a few other things besides. He was born in Barcelona in 1955 and embarked on his professional career in the early years of the transition, when opportunities to re-make everything and to dream seemed endless. It was a vibrant period of creative cross-fertilisation, with an underground, self-managed counterculture in which the energies of conceptual art, video art, experimental film, community video, comics and performance intertwined and radiated in multiple directions.
The Film Vídeo Informació (FVI) collective was founded against this backdrop in Barcelona in June 1977. It was conceived as a platform to investigate the creative, poetic and communicative potential of experimental film and of video—a medium that had just come on the scene in Catalonia and Spain.
The initial core members of Film Vídeo Informació were Bufill along with Eugènia Balcells, Eugeni Bonet, Carles Hac Mor, Manuel Huerga, Ignacio Julià and Luis Serra. Together (and sometimes separately) they organised film and video screenings and debates, translated unpublished texts, helped to established a library-archive, and published two issues of a fanzine-style magazine that they called Visual. The group disbanded in 1979, but all the ideas that had germinated then ended up expanding and materialising in subsequent years in the form of exhibition projects, publishing houses, film programmes and TV shows.
In this podcast, we sit down to talk with Juan Bufill about all this convergence of burgeoning creative energies. We talk about the founding of the FVI and the many different artistries that came together there, focusing on projects such as the collective film En la ciudad (1976-77), the screenings at the home of Xefo Guasch and at Cine Ars, and the working processes around the magazine Visual. Bufill also fills us in on some later works, such as the exhibition Cinéma d’avant-garde en Espagne. Une anthologie (Avant-garde Cinema in Spain. An Anthology)organised by Bufill, Bonet and Huergaat the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1982—which rescued the figure of José Val del Omar from oblivion—and the TV show Arsenal.
Conversation: Dolores Acebal and Anna Ramos. Script: Dolores Acebal. Sound production: Albert Tarrats. Voice over: Clàudia Faus. Sounds: RWM's library music.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED. Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional
POLYPHONIC MEMORIES FOR A SHARED PRESENT #2
Polyphonic memories for a shared present #2
In the second episode of this series we pick up where we left off in our conversation with Lluïsa Roca, Luisa Ortínez, Xefo Guasch and Carles Ameller. With them, we explore Vídeo-Nou’s working methodologies, which were developed on the go, in the field, by doing things: because video was a new medium at the time, and because, together, they were inventing a system of transversal collaboration through which to capture the views and demands of a society eager to express itself after forty years of dictatorship, censorship and repression. Vídeo-Nou saw video as a mechanism for social engagement and intervention, making space for listening, conversation and debate as creative tools. Through video, the group became actively involved in neighbourhoods, community centres and associations, trade unions, and cultural spaces, opening up platforms for dialogue.
Eugènia Balcells
Eugènia Balcells (Barcelona, 1943) began her artistic career in the mid-seventies within the conceptual art scene. A pioneer of experimental film, video art, and video installation, she also works with visual scores, artist’s books, objects, performance art, photocopies, sounds, and photographs. Balcells considers herself an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the possibilities of physics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, sociology, music, and poetry. She brings these disciplines into the field of art, as an agora from which to reimagine and reinvent the world. In FONS AUDIO #54 we join Eugènia Balcells in looking back over a life dedicated to art, pausing to examine some of her works in the MACBA collection.
Manuel Huerga
Manuel Huerga talks about his experimental origins and the role that film, art and television have played in the course of his career.