DOKU.ARTS
Zeughauskino Berlin
09.09.–27.09.2015
(Re)counting Architectures
Filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine have been working together for ten years and have garnered an international reputation through their film series Living Architectures. Bêka and Lemoine document contemporary architecture, focusing on new narrative and cinematographic forms and placing themselves at the intersection of video art and architectural anthropology. They question the purely visual approach to buildings and emphasise instead the vitality, fragility, and vulnerable beauty of architecture, as it is expressed and experienced by the people who inhabit, use, or maintain these spaces.
In film clips ranging from their debut Koolhaas Houselife (2008) to more recent documentaries including The Infinite Happiness (about a Bjarke Ingels’ building, 2015) and the video collection Spiriti (about OMA’s reconstruction of the Fondazione Prada, 2015), Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine present their approaches to architecture and explain how they work.
Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine
Ila Bêka trained as an architect with a degree from the IUAV of Venice and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Paris-Belleville. He lives and works as an artist and filmmaker in Paris. Louise Lemoine graduated in Cinema and Philosophy from the Sorbonne, Paris. In their documentaries on contemporary architecture, Bêka & Lemoine experiment with new narrative and cinematographic forms and are known for their creative and humoristic look at masterpieces of architecture. They were recently named “cult figures in the European architecture world” by The New York Times. Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine have been teaching at Columbia University (New York-Paris programme) since 2013.