At the end of the seventies, Barcelona was a party. The death of the dictator had left too many unknowns to be resolved. But amidst the anxieties and political upheavals of the moment, Barcelona became a state of permanent cultural celebration. Ocaña dominated the Ramblas; The theater owners had the Saló Diana, and the most commercial cinema was Orgia with Bellmunt and the films that would come from Ventura Pons and others. Time for libertarian meetings in Park Guëll; the Stones in the Monumental, and unclassifiable publications like Ajoblanco and Star. The street is/was for everyone and the neighbors joined the party...
In the midst of that recreational and cultural effervescence, a group of young people in love with experimental cinema - what was then called underground cinema - decided to explore the possibilities of nascent video in its encounter with art. They were photographers, poets and artists without a label, most of them in their twenties. They recognized each other at the end of the seventies to found the so-called FVI - an acronym for FilmVideo Informació - whose unique thoughts would be captured in the magazine Visual. As a magazine, Visual lasted only two issues, but that almost secret publication, photocopied and stapled by hand, is considered the movement's manifesto.
"The FVI was not just the magazine," says Juan Bufill, curator of the Visual Origen exhibition that opens its doors this Thursday at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Macba) dedicated to the group. All of them were young people from afternoons at the film library and long conversations at the end of the sessions. A very heterogeneous collective whose hard core was initially made up of - in addition to Bufill, filmmaker, poet, and current art critic for La Vanguardia - the artist Eugènia Balcells; the video agitator and spiritual father of the group, Eugeni Bonet; the poet, now deceased, Carles Hac Mor; the filmmaker Manuel Huerga and Ignasi Julià, founder of the magazine Ruta 66, an essential character to understand the times of rock'n'roll in the city.
Without forgetting Luis Serra, the group's unofficial photographer. "Because he had the best camera and was always ready," Serra himself jokes at the presentation of this exhibition that will be open until the end of May. Over time, others would be added to them, such as Jordi Beltran, a regular voice on RAC1, a precursor to an innovative way of understanding radio.
All of them, as individuals, have been finding their place in the Catalan cultural landscape, especially in the eighties and nineties. As a generation, however - as founders of the FVI - they are a lost generation. Or unknown. Until now, at least. Visual Origen shows part of their work as a group and vindicates them. And he also claims, with the projection of his films and television programs, such as the legendary Arsenal, on TV3, his essential function to understand everything that would come later.
"In those times everything was darkness," says Eugenia Balcells. "Then a match was lit and that humble match, which was us, revealed another, less dark reality." "We had a subversive perspective on art," adds Beltran. The FVI, as a cohesive group, did not last long. Just a couple of years. But his legacy is long, even today. "When everything was yet to be done and everything was still possible," says Manuel Huerga.
All members of FVI recognize the teaching of Eugeni Bonet. "Almodóvar called him every time he came to Barcelona," recalls Juan Bufill. "It was essential for him, at a time when Almodóvar was one of the most authoritative voices in what we called experimental cinema."
Bonet himself, if you ask him, doesn't really know why this admiring recognition from his colleagues. “Maybe for the same reason they kicked me out of Star magazine,” Bonet jokes. “Because he wrote about strange films that no one had seen, sometimes not even myself.” Modesto, it should be Huerga who highlights his work in the meeting. "We were all in tow of his wisdom," says the director of Salvador, who is currently finalizing the film Parenostre, about the figure of Jordi Pujol (Josep Maria Pou) and Marta Ferrusola (Carme Sansa).
It was precisely Ferrusola, Bofill recalled, who called TV3 to ask the management to "end this anarchist program." It refers to Arsenal, an unclassifiable television proposal, even today, which was on the air between 1985 and 1987. Fortunately, the reviled Alfons Quintà, a character with a dark end, including the murder of his wife, and who was then director of TV3, did not He heeded the suggestions of the first lady of the Catalan government.
"There were about forty programs," Bufill recalls, "in which sooner or later a good part of the FVI components participated." In the Visual Origen exhibition you can see program number 33, made by Manuel Huerga, with a script by Bufill and Beltran. There is a review of the 32 previous programs. A good summary of what has been the contribution of the FVI collective to the history of audiovisuals, those “anarchists”, according to Marta Ferrusola.
