Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine

Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine examine contemporary architecture and city living through novel narrative and cinematographic forms. Their films take a very particular and highly subjective view of the world that gives substance and life to the static image of contemporary architecture by homing in on notions of use. They provide a window onto a world teeming with personal stories that demonstrate how much the places we inhabit encompass social, cultural and political issues that affect us all.

Described by the New York Times as “cult figures of European architecture”, their films have been critically acclaimed and described as having “transformed the way we see architecture and the city” (Domus). In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired Bêka and Lemoine’s complete work for its permanent collection.

Homo Urbanus is a long-term, itinerant, creative and research project, conducted in cities across the world including Kyoto, Tokyo, Bogotá, Seoul, Naples, Rabat, Saint Petersburg and Mexico City. This free-form film project is a subjective immersion in the day-to-day lives on the streets of the various cities; a fragmented narrative whose themes are street hawkers and newspaper vendors, the informal economy, the ways people find to survive, and personal freedom versus collective rules. The comparative approach to the different urban settings shows each city as an experimental laboratory that we can inhabit, offering a singular, localised answer to the global challenge of living together.