Interview with Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine

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.

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.

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Ila Bêka y Louise Lemoine Bêka and Lemoine

Ila Bêka y Louise Lemoine. Artists, filmmakers, producers and publishers, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine have been working together for the past 10 years mainly focusing their research on experimenting new narrative and cinematographic forms in relation to contemporary architecture. Since 2007 they have been developing a film series entitled “Living Architectures”. “Koolhaas Houselife”, renowned as the “architecture cult movie” (El Pais), is probably the most famous film of their series, featuring Guadalupe - the irresistible housekeeper of the Bordeaux House built by Rem Koolhaas.

Selected as one of the 100 most talented personalities of 2017 by Icon Design, presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) as one of the “most exciting and critical design project of the year 2016”, the complete work of Bêka & Lemoine has been acquired in 2016 by the Museum of Modern Art in New-York (MoMA) for their permanent collection. Their films have been widely shown in some of the most prestigious international cultural institutions and events such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Barbican Centre (London), CCA (Montreal) and Fondazione Prada (Milan, Italy).