UTOPIA IS POSSIBLE. ICSID. EIVISSA, 1971. #1
Culture, Counterculture, Design. The path to freedom
Research and interviews: Teresa Grandas. Design and editing: Teresa Grandas, Dolores Acebal and Lucrecia Dalt
This three-part miniseries looks back at the 7th Congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) and pieces together an ensemble narrative based on the testimonies of some of its protagonists.
Forty-one years after the Congress in Eivissa, designers, architects, artists, philosophers and other professionals from the cultural field come together again to reconstruct and analyse the spirit of that adventure. The interviews that are reproduced here were originally recorded on video and are part of the exhaustive research behind the exhibition ‘Utopia is Possible. ICSID. Eivissa, 1971’.
Episode one of this miniseries looks at the socio-political context in which the 1971 ICSID Eivissa experience was conceived during the final years of Franco’s dictatorship, a period in which culture took on a key role in the fight for freedoms. More specifically, design professionals and the design schools that were starting to pop up in Barcelona acted as a driving force and a hub for this desire for change. At the same time, subversive echoes of the hippy movement were starting to arrive in the country from the other side of the Atlantic.
In this first episode, we revisit the early days of Video-Nou and its connection with other artists who were also starting to work with video in Catalonia. Hand in hand with Lluïsa Roca, Luisa Ortínez, Xefo Guasch and Carles Ameller, we look at the collective’s relationship with the counterculture, the underground, and libertarian movements. And we consider the particularities of video as a tool for documentary, communication, creation, and protest, with special attention to its uses within the political and social context of the period of the Spanish transition. We explore strategies such as feedback and counterinformation, and we get a behind-the-scenes insight into the making of Video-Nou’s first projects: Gràcia. Espais Verds (February-March 1977) and Campanya política per a la Lliga de Catalunya (April-May 1977), better known as the Video-Bus.
"UTOPIA IS POSSIBLE. ICSID. EIVISSA, 1971" is a three-part miniseries based on the research carried out for the exhibition of the same name. It brings together the testimonies of some of the participants who took part in the 7th Congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), in an ensemble portrait of this collective experience.
Bartomeu Marí, Daniel Giralt-Miracle and Teresa Grandas talk about the research processes and the execution of the "Utopia is possible. ICSID. EIVISSA, 1971" exhibition.