The most popular "Koolhaas HouseLife", a documentary in the artists’ Living Architectures series, is about a home designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.
Living Architectures, the filmmakers said, is a series of films that seeks to develop a way of looking at architecture that turns away from the current trend of idealizing the representation of our architectural heritage.
Through their films, Bêka and Lemoine demonstrate the vitality, fragility and vulnerable beauty of architecture as recounted and witnessed by people who actually live in, use or maintain the spaces they have selected.
Their films focus less on explaining the building, its structure and its technical details than on letting the viewer enter into the invisible bubble of the daily intimacy of contemporary architectural icons.
Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, co-founders of BêkaFilms, visited Texas A&M were interviewed Feb. 28 by Peter Lang, associate professor of architecture, and Jasmine Benyamin, assistant professor of architecture, in the Viz Lab’s studio A at Langford Architecture Center. The video was edited by Mark Mattson.
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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:
July 14, 2011
Cite:
"Interview with Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine" METALOCUS.
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ISSN 1139-6415
