Homo Urbanus. A Citymatographic Odyssey by Bêka & Lemoine

Through close observation of how people inhabit, adapt, appropriate, or endure the spaces that frame their lives, artists and filmmakers Bêka & Lemoine cast light on the way people and places influence each other to unveil how the built environment affects our physical, psychological, and emotional state.

In parallel to a body of films that have sought to humanise the way architecture is perceived and represented, since 2017 Bêka & Lemoine have been travelling the world to explore the idea of the city as an ecosystem, observing the peculiarities of the species they name Homo Urbanus in the international habitat it continues to construct—and be constructed by.

At MAC/CCB, the largest presentation of this extensive ongoing project to date exhibits over 13 hours of films from 13 very different cities—from Rabat to Venice, Tokyo to Mumbai. With endless curiosity and unusual proximity, Bêka & Lemoine gather evidence from local laboratories of the great global experiment in how to live together. Framing the street as a grand stage where the actions of daily life are performed, this epic video installation of pure cinematic observation invites the visitor on a journey through global urban space. Organised in three zones of different editorial and experiential logics, the exhibition also proposes a reflection about how the way we look can be an act of editing itself.

In a mirror of the spontaneous encounters that guided their making, at the centre of this exhibition screens an ever-changing composition of four films drawn from the 13 impressions of individual cities of the current corpus of Homo Urbanus. Choreographically juxtaposed in a game of chance, this conversation between the sounds and images of different cities simultaneously invites viewers to closely inspect specific urban situations, and to perform comparisons between them.

Through this vast, vibrant fresco of contemporary living conditions, the universal and the specific, the common and the strange, and the collective and the individual are placed in dialogue to foreground the relationships—both to space and to each other—that cities direct and reflect. Through their embodied camera, Bêka & Lemoine’s cinema of gestures proposes an “inversion in the way we imagine the city: from life to buildings—and not the other way around.”