Shortly after the war in Ukraine broke out, the Grisart photography school in Barcelona contacted the Kyiv Photo School to offer help. They located its director, but the center was closed down, the students had been called up and the teachers were in the front, cameras in hand, documenting the devastation of towns and cities as the army advanced through the territory. . A selection of those images, taken “without the documentary filmmaker’s distance, in a state of shock”, are now projected on the rough and anguished walls of the air-raid shelter in Plaça Maluquer i Salvador de Granollers, where hundreds of citizens took refuge from the bombings of the fascist aviation during the Civil War.
“It is overwhelming to contemplate these images, in which there are no corpses, only devastated landscapes and ruined buildings, in a space where you can still feel the fear of the citizens of Granollers every time the Condors appeared”, says Albert Gusi, director of Grisart and one of the Ukrainian Landscape Commissioners, shows that it can be visited during restricted hours and by prior registration. This is one of the most impressive proposals of the Panoràmic film and photography festival, which until November 27 brings together 19 exhibitions and 50 activities in different spaces in Granollers and Barcelona.
After addressing themes such as revolt, uncertainty or intimacy, the contest enters its sixth edition around the idea of ??”fourth landscape”, a concept that refers to the book by Gilles Clément, Manifesto of the Third Landscape (Gustavo Gili), where the architect and gardener defended those residual spaces, which remain outside the human order, but in which, however, vegetation and life emerge. “What we do is propose the existence of a fourth landscape, which would be the defeat of nature and its replacement by an artificial nature, which is recreated in video games, virtual experiences, fantastic landscapes…. In a world that is degrading, instead of avoiding its devastation we build another artificial one. That is the idea”, says Joan Fontcuberta, co-director with Albert Gusi himself and Laia Casanova.
The central space is in Roca Umbert Fàbrica de les Arts, where the Swiss Jojakim Cortis
In a more political register, Ursula Biemann shows different situations of conflict in the Amazon jungle in the video installation Forest Mind, and Mayra Martell records the devastation of a city in a mining area in Peru. The most raunchy and irreverent note is put by the RiverBoom collective, made up of photojournalists who “burned out” in Afghanistan, with a series in homage to photographer Anselm Adams, whose American landscape now features a human figure showing his butt.
And, among the proposals dedicated to digital creation, the films by Welshman Andy Kelly, Other Places, stand out, where he hacks video games, stripping them of enemies to beat and showing us naked imaginary landscapes (in l’Adoberia).
