Exploring the sociophysical territory with audiovisual media

After the visual analysis of the cityscape, students of the course Systems of Representation 21/22 continued to explore the socio-physical territory of the city of L’Hospitalet in the second semester by means of the audiovisual language. The class was divided in two groups, each one tutored by a two guest artists -Claudio Zulian, filmmaker, and Miquel Garcia, multidisciplinary artist- and the architecture staff of the course, Leandro Madrazo, Ángel Martín and Mario Hernández.

The videos produced by students were exhibited in an installation in Plantauno on 9 June 2022. This event was included in the New European Bauhaus festival under the title “A-Place: Placing audiovisual narratives”.

At the end of the seminar, the two guest artists created a video production with the recordings made by students:

- “80.189”, by Miquel Garcia

- “A journey to L’Hospitalet de Llobregat”, by Claudio Zulian

Each tutor developed a different creative strategy to perceive the cityscape.

- Group Claudio Zulian. The students’ first activity was to make a drift through the city with the video camera. They were directly exposed to a territory which was new for them, given that most of them were foreign students. They wrote down their impressions of the city walk they had gone on in a notebook and related them to their previous experiences, taking as an example Dylan Thomas’ poem "Under Milk Wood". After their tour, they interviewed residents about their experience of living in the city. The reference for this task was the documentary “Chronique d’un été”, from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Finally, the students worked in teams to create a video to transmit their own experience of the city, which contrasted with that of the inhabitants.

- Group Miquel García. The students’ first activity was to draw a concept map of L’Hospitalet. On a 10 m. long board, they wrote a word that represented the city, and mapped out relationships to other words. The map was a first collective perception of the city, and the basis used by the teams to propose a theme to be explored through the audiovisual medium. Afterwards they created a structure for the audiovisual production in the form of a storyboard. The final step was a groupwork activity in which the students the produced a video on the proposed thematic. 

The meetings of students and tutors took place in city premises instead of the classrooms. The base of one of the groups was the Tecla Sala Art Centre, and the second Plantauno, a centre dedicated to prototyping knowledge of cultural practices and their relationship to social development.