Gandules Gas Natural Fenosa Competition now down to its finalists

June 6th, 2014 No Comments

When August comes around, the people of Barcelona know they have a date with the CCCB. During 11 editions over as many years, Gandules has offered a very varied programme of films al fresco. This year, to coincide with 20 years of the CCCB, Gandules has been opened up to the public in an international competition whose theme is “Away from Home” – in other words, emigration.

Over 50 short films have been entered for the competition from different countries, especially from Spain (Catalonia, Madrid, Basque Country, Andalusia, Valencian Community and Galicia), but also from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Of all of these films, the following twenty have been selected:

  • 9 dies, Imma Gandia and David Castro (Tarragona, Spain), 2014, 13 min 4 sec
  • Adeus, Antón Varela and Maria José Pérez (A Coruña, Spain), 2012, 4 min 25 sec
  • Aller et retour, Núria Monjo Pastor (Valencia, Spain), 2012, 2 min 13 sec
  • Asghar, diario ambulante, Violeta Blasco Caño (Barcelona, Spain), 2013, 15 min
  • Becas Azkuna, Araceli Sánchez Perna (Bilbao, Spain), 2013, 2 min 17 sec
  • El Guatón, Kiko Santos (Sao Paulo, Brazil), 2012, 4 min
  • El viatge, Helena Bonastre (Barcelona, Spain), 2014, 14 min 3 sec
  • Encajados, Alberto Bougleux (Barcelona, Spain/Italy), 2013, 15 min
  • Gabriel, Alice Cugusi (Italy/France), 2011, 9 min 58 sec
  • Imágenes secretas, Diana Toucedo Crespo (Barcelona, Spain), 2013, 15 min
  • Las tardes, Alba Molas Closas (Barcelona, Spain), 2014, 10 min
  • Lugares comunes, Delia Márquez Sánchez and Pablo Díaz Morilla (Malaga, Spain), 2014, 3 min 21 sec
  • Míjau, Olaia Sendón (A Coruña, Spain), 2014, 7 min 56 sec
  • Primers dies, Incoming new students at the Institut Milà i Fontanals (Barcelona, Spain; Pakistani, Bengali and Filipino pupils), 2013, 12 min 06 sec
  • Spaniards in London, Javier Moreno Caballero (Spain/United Kingdom), 2013, 9 min 15 sec
  • Toledo, Ohio, Maria Solé and Melissa Suárez del Real (Spain/Mexico/France), 2014, 4 min 21 sec
  • Tu i Berlin, Anna Mitjà Comas (Girona, Spain), 2013, 14 min
  • Udlandet, Aina Pociello Mas (Barcelona, Spain), 2014, 3 min 33 sec
  • Viceversa, Atzin Ortiz González (Mexico/Argentina), 2013, 6 min
  • Voluntario, Javier Marco (Madrid, Spain), 2014, 3 min 52 sec

These short films are highly varied in terms of genre: documentary, fiction, animation, experimental and even video art. The majority portray dramatic situations and injustices, but there are also some that treat the topic with humour. Two main themes can be singled out: stories about African or Latin American immigrants in our country, and stories about people from our country who have had to leave, forced by the crisis. As an anecdote, it is interesting to highlight the large number of short films explaining this experience from Berlin, as well as the fact that the majority are works produced by women.

From now on, it will be the audience’s job to vote for their favourites, which can be seen shortly on the website of the CCCB, up until xx July. The nine shorts that obtain the most votes will be screened before each Gandules film and, in addition, will obtain a three-month subscription to Filmin. The winning short film, to be decided by a jury of professionals linked to the audiovisual and cultural world, will win the Gas Natural Fenosa Prize which has a value of 500 euros. In addition, the 20 selected films will also each receive a Friends of the CCCB card.

Vote for the nine shorts that we will be screening at each session of Gandules’14 Gas Natural Fenosa on this link. You can vote up until 6 July at midnight.

Al Fresco Programme

Gandules Gas Natural Fenosa is an audiovisual season that runs during each month of August in the Pati de les Dones of the CCCB. Since 2003, the programme has been linked to the CCCB’s activities and has been scheduled by different programmers, who each year have proposed a selection of eclectic films. For example, the 2003 series was devoted to trash culture, coinciding with an exhibition on the same theme; that of 2005 was devoted to humour; in 2006 the series was related with NOW. Meetings in the Present Continuous; 2008 explored interculturality, while for 2009 films were screened about music in film, and in 2012, experts from the world of cinema, such as Àngel Quintana, Núria Vidal, Carlos Losilla and Jordi Costa chose some of the best films that were acclaimed by critics but had little success with the commercial circuits.

Gandules Gas Natural Fenosa will be held from 5 to 21 August and the subjects of the main films, as with the short films, are stories that talk about emigrants in current times and that tell us about the difficult and unexpected paths they have to travel in order to reach a place where they trust they will find what their country of origin could not provide: a job, freedom, and opportunities for a better life. Among other films, there will be two premières: I am from Chile, by Gonzalo Díez (Chile, 2013), and Il·legal, by Olivier Masset-Depasse (Belgium, Luxembourg, France, 2010), along with titles such as The Yellow Sea, by Na Hong-jin (South Korea, 2010), Al otro lado, by Fatih Akin (Germany, Turkey, 2007) and La piragua, by Senegalese filmmaker Moussa Touré (Senegal, France, Germany, 2012).

Five things you never knew about your data and that Big Bang Data can explain to you

June 4th, 2014 No Comments

Everything you do (and say, and write) on Facebook is in Sweden

When you post a photo on Facebook or share a status with your “virtual” friends, what you have just created – your data – do not remain wandering around in space, in an abstract or immaterial place. They have a little trip pending to the Swedish city of Lulea, which is the location of the largest Facebook data centre outside of the USA. Messages, interests, “likes”, hobbies, shared friends: all rest in a vast structure that is charged with maintaining and preserving this information that you have produced and shared. Storing it has a price and a cost in terms of energy, and they take advantage of the arctic cold to save on air conditioning.

© Gunnar Knechtel

Egos, webcams and YouTube

What would happen if we put together on an immense mural with fragments of some of the clips you have seen on YouTube in recent years? Cookery recipes, political speeches, political arguments, in favour, against, declarations of love, beauty tips, covers of songs, Photoshop tutorials. Everyone wants to feel they are being listened to and YouTube is the great mixed bag of the web world where everyone can say their bit. So, to a certain extent this is the experiment involved in “Hello world! Or: how I learned to stop listening and love noise”, by Christopher Baker, an awe-inspiring mural that you can see at BBD, formed based on small and diverse clips, varied miscellany, from over 5000 personal diaries found on the Internet. You will not be able to hear anything, you will probably not understand a single word, the general cacophony and the constant blablabla will only serve to make you realise that inside the immensity of the Internet, everyone can talk about everything.

The room full of Flickr photos

Right at the very moment that you “click” to upload a new photo to Flickr, over a half a million people make – or have made or will make – exactly the same movement in the next 24 hours. The volume of “clicks” is so extraordinary as to fill an entire room with photographs. This is shown by the installation “24 hrs in photos” by Dutch collector and photographer Eric Kessels, which you will also find at the exhibition, and which immerses you (literally) in a sea of the photographs taken and uploaded to Flickr in 24 hours. Perhaps you haver never given it much thought, but the 356 photos that you are storing in your mobile are a minuscule percentage in relation to the global quantity of visual data that we manufacture daily.

Data can tell you how your sex life is going

One of the most surprising installations at BBD is that produced by Jaime Serra, an expert in infographics at La Vanguardia, who shows through a simple graphic the state of his relationship with his partner and their level of sexual activity during a one-year period. Based on coloured lines (and with the indefatigable help of his wife, who compiled all the data), Serra draws a map of his relationship with his partner. A good example of how the visualisation of data based on infographics and maps can help us understand or interpret reality. Nicholas Feltron also does a similar exercise wtih the yearbook Feltron (2012), a book in which this New York data expert “mapifies” in a scrupulous, slightly obsessive way, his life during an entire year: the top 10 people he has most talked, the issues he has talked about most, the airports he has passed through, the volume of photographs he has taken or, even, the food he has eaten.

Data for the common good

The dissemination of our data has its drawbacks, clearly. Espionage or the use made of them by major companies and corporations represents a growing threat to our privacy. Even so, foundations exist, such as Civio, that propose a “benign” use of data and call for a journalism committed to citizens and the freedom of data, or “open data”. At the exhibition you can discover some of the tools Civio offers, such as “Donde van mis impuestos” (Where do my taxes go?), which serves to see in a clear and very illustrative way where our taxes have been going since 2008 and up to the present day or “Tu tasa de paro” (Your unemployment rate) based on the Active Population Survey (EPA), to find out the unemployment rate according to age, sex and location in Spain.

The Big Bang Data exhibition can be visited at the CCCB until 26 October, from Tuesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and followed via #BBDATA and on the website http://bigbangdata.cccb.org

Zeidun: 15 years hiding talent

May 7th, 2014 1 Comment

Zeidun © Oriol Escarmis

For years we have accepted it with total normality, as if it were intrinsic to them, but it is not, nor is it habitual, or common, or anything remotely like that. Perhaps because we had never paused to analyse it. It was so evident that we were looking at extremely talented people, that we never considered it. But at the time we couldn’t see it, perhaps some intuited it, but we doubt that anyone would dare to put their hand up and admit, heatedly, that they knew what would happen later.

We are at the start of this century and the venue might be a gaztetxe in Pamplona, or a piece of land in La Roca, or the Sant Feliu Fest, it doesn’t matter. Five twenty-year olds on the stage. T-shirts featuring Swedish hardcore bands, and low-slung trousers, incredibly low-slung trousers. Some tattered Vans and everything sounds out of synch, a disastrous racket. Their lyrics talk about our lot, it is the moment and the era, there is no alternative but to bring out all their adolescent fury in those songs. That’s their way. Ours is standing below, with a raised fist and a sweaty body while we sing them all: “Every song I play, every word I say, everything I do, all my acts are just for you”. The notes of “Galactic” and the five lads that destroy it live are called Zeidun, like the dog of their mate in Sant Celoni. And they are the best group in the world, even though they don’t seem to be, even though it would take us years to know that they are.

But time has shown that yes, they were the best. That behind that band that didn’t stand out, that lived in the most extreme anti-pretentiousness, there were, precisely, brutally inspirational people. How can one define, if not, Dalmau Boada? Restless, experimental, ingenious and good, stunningly good. “Mau” has made “cult” groups like someone going out to buy a loaf of bread. But in the year 2000, when recording Oceane with Zeidun, we probably wouldn’t have given a cent for the drummer of that group of kids from the Montseny. Well we should have, because that lad who looked like he’d just come out of the jungle went on to form Omega V, and later Les Aus, and after that Esperit! And these are bands that have changed the game rules of the music scene in Catalonia. Or Joan Colomo, who formed, together with Mau, La Célula Durmiente. Have you ever known a band that was bigger fun? I haven’t. You would see Colomo fall off the stage with Zeidun because of the amount of beers in his blood, but later they ended up recruiting him to form part of The Unfinished Sympathy, probably the most outstanding indy-rock band that has ever existed in this country. And while the years passed, he made songs, songs that one day came to light in solo, and it turned out that they so good that he gets calls from all over the place and everyone knows who he is. But hadn’t we agreed that he was just the vocalist with four notes and long hair heading up Zeidun? Even my mom knows who Colomo is.

Xavi, the bass guitarist, has been less active, during the last decade “all” he has done has been to form part of a group called Els Surfing Sirles, that’s “all”. Els Surfing Sirles were the best, but you already know that. Candid, the two-meter giant who played keyboard, has formed so many bands that they can’t be written on three pages. This is not an opinion, it is not conditional, it is real information, because we’ve seen it with our own eyes. Now he can be seen playing with Murnau B and Autodestrucció, but recently he was the headline drummer with Joan Pons of El Petit de Cal Eril. Albert Trabal played guitar and trumpet with Zeidun, and also did so in a pile of bands such as Rain Still Falling and, later, with L’Orquestra de Sant Celoni.

Probably when they all played together, they never showed us their real potential. Excuse the expression, but that band was just the tip. Sufficient for us to look back now and, finally, start to defend their previous and subsequent work and, above all, their work as Zeidun. An emo-core band full of exciting and fantastic moments. Here and now, it’s the right time to thank them for everything they’ve given us with their multiple names, with all their faces. This is the feedback that they never received and, undoubtedly, they deserve, for so many great nights and great days rounded off by their songs.

On 15 May 2014 Gentnormal and La Fonoteca Barcelona have programmed It’s killing me but I like it: A genealogy of Zeidun for the third session of #BCNmp7. The session will consist of performances by Zeidun and by many of these bands: Joan Colomo – who has just released a new disc, Els Surfing Sirles – revived for the occasion, Esperit!, La Célula Durmiente, Autodestrucció, L’orquestra de Sant Celoni, Murnau B and Omega V). In addition, there will be screenings of small documentary capsules about the musicians and free distribution of a fanzine and a CD that cover this “genealogy”. On Monday 12 May in the afternoon we will be giving out 5×2 free admission tickets via our Twitter account @CCCBmusica, all you need to do is answer a question.

(Català) Sant Jordi 2014: La llista d’autors Primera Persona

April 22nd, 2014 No Comments

(Català) Lapsus i Barcelona, l’intens impacte de la música electrònica

April 14th, 2014 2 Comments

«...10...1516171819...304050...»