BARBICANIA vs. On Barbicania: Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine

A new film by these great filmmakers, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, well known for his film "House Life", a film about a house designed by Rem Koolhaas. This time a video diary of a one month immersion in the life of the Barbican from the top floors of the towers to the underground levels of the art centre. Through an impressive gallery of portraits, the film draws an intimate and lively map of this brutalist masterpiece situated in the core of London.

From the top of the towers to the underground levels of the arts centre, discover the personalities, lifestyle and architecture that bring the Barbican to life in Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine’s feature length-film, Barbicania.

An intimate and lively filmic map of our Brutalist masterpiece.

Directed by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, Barbicania is a feature length film capturing a month-long immersion in the life of London’s Barbican Centre and Estate.

Join Bêka and Lemoine as they meet a diverse range of people who live and work in the Barbican. Conceived as a series of diaristic vignettes, Barbicania invites you to discover the personalities, lifestyle and architectural landscapes that make the Barbican so special. With fantastic stories from those who experience the Barbican on an everyday basis: such as Neil who tends to the plants and fish in the Barbican Centre’s conservatory; Paolo who talks about having the ‘magic key’; and Camilla who delves into the Barbican psyche.

Ila and Louise talking about "Barbicania" on Robert Elms show on the BBC Radio.

‘Reality is more interesting than fiction…’

Presented by The New York Times as the ‘cult figures in the European architecture world’, Bêka and Lemoine mainly focus their research on experimenting with new narrative and cinematographic forms in relation to contemporary architecture. The uniqueness of their work results from a subjective, creative and humorous look at masterpieces of architecture portrayed as they are experienced in daily life.

Ila Bêka is an Italian artist and filmmaker. He trained as an architect with a degree from the IUAV of Venice and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Paris-Belleville. Louise Lemoine is a French filmmaker. She graduated in cinema and philosophy from the Sorbonne, Paris.

BARBICANIA - A film by Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine.

France-UK, 2014, HD, colour, 90 min
A video diary of a month-long immersion in the life of the Barbican, from the top floors of the towers to the underground levels of the arts centre. An intimate and lively map of this brutalist masterpiece.
Image.- Ila Bêka
Sound.- Louise Lemoine
Production Manager.- Marco Mona
Editing.- Ila Bêka, Louise Lemoine
Production.- Bêka & Partners - Barbican Centre

Turning the camera on themselves, directors Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine reflect on their month-long immersion in the life of the Barbican Centre and Estate and the people they met during the making of Barbicania.

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More information

Ila Bêka y Louise Lemoine Bêka and Lemoine

Ila Bêka y Louise Lemoine. Artists and filmmakers working at the crossroads of visual arts and non-fiction cinema. For the past twenty years, Bêka & Lemoine’s work has been exploring a critical perspective on architecture as a subtle instrument of social control. Through an observational and often humorous perspective, their cinematic approach foregrounds the frictions between design and daily life, revealing how people experience, adapt to, resist, or reinterpret architectural intentions. Their work emphasizes how architecture shapes not only movement and behaviour, but also emotions and social dynamics.

Together, Ila Bêka (Latisana, Italia, 1967) y Louise Lemoine (Burdeos, Francia, 1981) have made over forty films, among which are "Koolhaas HouseLife" (2008), ‘Barbicania’ (2014), ‘The Infinite Happiness’ (2015), ‘Moriyama San’ (2017), ‘Tokyo Ride’ (2020) and the city-matographic odyssey in 14 films ‘Homo Urbanus’ (2017-ongoing). In 2023, they published the book The Emotional Power of Space (B&P ed.)

Presented by The New-York Times as the “cult figures in the European architecture world”, Bêka & Lemoine’s work has been widely acclaimed as “a new form of criticism” (Mark), which “has deeply changed the way of looking at architecture” (Domus). Selected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (the Met) as one of the “Most exciting and critical design projects of the year 2016”, Bêka & Lemoine were elected “Game Changers 2015” by Metropolis Magazine, and selected as one of the “100 most talented personalities of 2017” by Icon Design.

Their films have been widely presented in both solo and collective exhibitions at leading art and architecture museums, including Fondation Beyeler (Basel), Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), Fondation Prada (Milan), MAXXI (Rome), La Biennale di Venezia (Venice), and the Barbican Art Gallery (London), among others.

In 2016, the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art in NY acquired Bêka & Lemoine’s entire body of work produced until that date for its permanent collection. Their films are also part of other public and private art collections, including MAXXI (Rome), CNAP Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Paris), Fondazione Prada (Milan), MAC/CCB Fundaçao Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon), among others.

Bêka & Lemoine are regularly invited to lecture in some leading universities: GSD / Harvard University (USA), GSAPP / Columbia University (New-York, USA), AAP / Cornell University (USA), Bartlett School of Architecture / UCL (London, UK). They have been invited as guest professors at GSAPP / Columbia University (New York) for the New York / Paris Program, at HEAD in Geneva (Switzerland), and from 2019 to 2021, they have been teaching the design Studio Diploma 16 (M.Arch.) at AA Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. They are currently teaching the course “Filming architecture” at Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (Switzerland).

Their films are regularly shown in international film festivals, including CPH: DOX, Ji.hlava IDFF, Dok Leipzig, BAFICI, DocAviv, FIFA, Torino Film Festival, AFFR, among many others, where they have received many awards and distinctions.

In 2018, they have been laureate of Villa Kujoyama, a French residency program for artists in Japan, and Ila Bêka has been laureate Italian Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Published on: November 4, 2014

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metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA

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