In Barcelona at the end of the 70s, there were multiple ephemeral spaces whose stories of community, resistance and reinvention shaped the counterculture of that moment. The Film Vídeo Informació (FVI) collective, made up of young critics, filmmakers, artists, poets and photographers passionate about film and video, was one of those spaces. The set of actions that this group undertook left indelible marks both on the cultural life of the city and on the work of its members. The Visual Origin exhibition, which can be seen at the Macba until the end of May, attempts to follow the trail of some of them and intuit the network of exchanges and interrelationships that were generated, thus bringing us closer to the microhistory of this group where ideas and friendship went hand in hand.
There were many circumstances that led Eugènia Balcells, Eugeni Bonet, Juan Bufill, Carles Hac Mor, Manuel Huerga, Ignasi Julià and Luis Serra to conceive this platform dedicated to the creation, dissemination and thought of the film image, understood in a broad sense. , both as a means to think about vision, and in interrelation with other disciplines. These were years in which the Pamplona Meetings (1972), which revealed the links between local artistic practices and international avant-garde movements, continued to mark the cultural life of the country.
In Barcelona we witnessed the final stage of the Grup de Treball, a collective of artists who developed conceptual art strongly linked to the anti-Franco struggle, and which gave way to the coexistence of various groups. Among them was the FVI, which pursued a more formalistic line, far removed from the social and documentary concerns of another contemporary group and heir to the local television and community video work of Antoni Muntadas, the Vídeo Nou.
In addition to attending the latest meetings of the Grup de Treball, many of the members of Film Vídeo Informació coincided in the screenings that were held at the Filmoteca, at the Institute of North American Studies and at the German Institute, and at exhibition openings in galleries of the city, sharing concerns about experimental cinema and emerging video. From these meetings the FVI was born, which, despite lasting just over two years, formed an active laboratory that, in Balcells’ words, was a flash of light in the darkness, an intense and brief flame of a match with the force to activate vision.
This image of that point of light alludes to the film projection space and some of the activities that this group carried out, such as the presentation of Line Describing a Cone (1973) by Anthony McCall in July 1977, and the projection of Le Bleu des Origines (1978) by Philippe Garrel, with music by Nico live, in the summer of 1978, a film in which we find this same lighting motif again and again.
Much of the documentation of these and other activities can be found in the Visual Origen exhibition curated by Juan Bufill. Among the documents on display – photos, letters, theater programs and movie posters – there is also the magazine Visual, a self-published publication, like many fanzines of the time, which had only two issues in which it dealt with authors such as Antoni Padrós, McCall , Chantal Akerman or Michael Snow, and themes such as experimental cinema, video or formalism and politics. An important part of the exhibition is also dedicated to the film work of the different members of the FVI, who, in addition to thinking about cinema, made a set of films that investigate perceptual experience.
Of the set of works projected, it is worth mentioning the collective work En la ciudad (1976-1977) in which Bonet (initiator of this project), Balcells, Bufill and Huerga participated, along with other filmmakers and conceptual artists such as Iván Zulueta, Muntadas, Valcárcel Medina, Eulàlia Grau, Francesc Torres, Benet Rossell, among others, who began to experiment with the image, movement and video starting with the super 8. The complex political background of that moment of transition is reflected in the epidermis of their urban images. It is also worth mentioning Fuga (1979) by Balcells, which could form a film portrait of this group. In this film we can see, in addition to the artist, Bonet and Hac Mor, and silently witness some of their daily actions, smoking a cigarette, reading the newspaper or writing.
Visual Origen also alludes to other later projects in which we can find traces of this group, such as the edition of the book Enaround the video (1980), in which Eugeni Bonet participated, the series of programs Arsenal, directed by Manuel Huerga and broadcast on TV3 between 1985 and 1987, and the Metrònom room, which was born in the same space that FVI had previously occupied. Along the way there have been films that were lost, utopias and dreams that never came true. However, it is essential not to forget each of these losses and failures in order to continue weaving, in the manner of Carles Hac Mor, other rebellious stories.
Visual Source. Film / Video / Information. Curator: Juan Bufill. Macbeh. Barcelona www.macba.cat. Until May 26
