Nesta Morgan

An interview with Pere Portabella,

President of The International Jury of the Orizzonti section,

director (Spain) of Die Stille Vor Bach and, this year the 20 minute short film Mudanza(Removal) in the Orizzonti Events.

I had passed through a set of three walls at Arsenale Art Biennale - displaying just walking sticks, and then entered through several adjoining rooms of pure colour - red, green, yellow, blue. As I moved through each space with my eyes closed I could still see their colour, and I asked Portabella if this was how he felt as a director, able to see with his eyes closed.

I observed he carries a walking stick, the handle decorated with the head of Bach, it reminded me of a picture of Lorca’s contemporary, Dali, who had carried a similar prop. For Portabella it gives character and affords him a moment of stillness.

Portabella said filming is about less work, shooting a few images in his head and letting the spectator enter a silence, emptiness, like music. He went on to say the history of art is the most abstract of space, and with Aristotle’s principle “direct no space” the audience is not passive.

His film Mudanza screening at Venice in the Orizzonti events, came to be made after the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist asked for involvement in the Huerta de San Vicente, the home and museum of the García-Lorca family in Granada. Mudanza is a Still life, full of imagery and our relationship with memory, an admirable portrait of a renowned Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca who was killed over his words by nationalists in 1939. In a 20 minute period the film charades furniture being wrapped and removed from Lorca’s house/museum echoing his own family departure from their residence in 1925. Portabella shows us this by directing the emptying of a space bathed in light, a portrait of Federico Garcia Lorca in a yellow bathrobe is put into a box, the lid closed, and with this imagery we sense Lorca’s absence today more. We take from the film experience whatever we ask from it.

Nesta Morgan