SILENT CINEMA
Homo Urbanus
HOMO URBANUS
France, 2017-2022, HD, colors
1. Homo Urbanus Neapolitanus, 45 min
2. Homo Urbanus Seoulianus, 45 min
3. Homo Urbanus Rabatius, 45 min
4. Homo Urbanus Petroburgumus, 45 min
5. Homo Urbanus Bogotanus, 45 min
6. Homo Urbanus Kyotoitus, 65 min
7. Homo Urbanus Tokyoitus, 55 min
8. Homo Urbanus Shanghaianus, 55 min
9. Homo Urbanus Dohanus, 55 min
10. Homo Urbanus Venetianus, 55 min
The Homo Urbanus project, conceived and created by the artists-filmmakers Bêka & Lemoine, is a cinematographic odyssey that offers a vibrant tribute to what we have been most cruelly deprived of in the years marked by the pandemic and the consequent constraints of isolation and social alienation: the public space.
Conceived as a free-wheel trip around the world (10 films, 10 cities, 10 hours of films), the project invites you to observe in detail the multiple forms and complex interactions that are created every day between people and the urban contexts in which they live.
On the occasion of the installation created for the Landscape Festival 2023, Topotek 1 invited Bêka & Lemoine to present the film cycle in Piazza Vecchia.
The 10 feature films will be screened twice, over 5 evenings from 16 to 20 September. The films explore our condition as inhabitants of urban contexts and the way the city shapes and conditions us. By assembling different films, this installation looks at cities as unique responses to the global challenge of living together. The intervention made by Topotek 1 thus offers not only an opportunity to meet but also to discuss issues of environmental and social significance.
Bêka & Lemoine
"Our approach to cinema linked to architecture, since our first film 20 years ago, has been to convey an idea of space through the experiences experienced and embodied by people".
Bêka & Lemoine
​
Bêka & Lemoine have stood out on the international architectural scene for the last 15 years through a cinematographic work known for its innovative nature and its tender and biting humour, which has disrupted the usual representation of contemporary architecture by putting people and uses at the forefront.
A project which defeats the question of genre, by placing itself at the edges of the documentary and video art, through a singular and highly subjective style. Thanks to an authentic artistic perspective on architecture, Bêka & Lemoine open new horizons to the relationship between architecture and cinema.
Presented by The New-York Times as the “cult figures in the European architecture world”, Beka & 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 designproject of the year 2016”, elected “Game Changers 2015” by Metropolis Magazine, selected as one of the “100 most talented personalities of 2017” by Icon Design, the complete work of Bêka & Lemoine has been acquired in 2016 by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York for its permanent collection.