El Bòlit pays tribute to Pere Portabella and inaugurates "Acció Santos" and "Gosar poder"

The opening of the Acciò Santos exhibitions will take place on 11 February 2022 at 6.30 pm. Musical thought in cinema by Pere Portabella, in Bòlit_PouRodò, and Gosar Poder, an installation by Isaki Lacuesta, in Bòlit_SantNicolau, curated by Ona Balló. The event will be attended by Pere Portabella named doctor honoris causa by the University of Girona. These two proposals, which go through the filmmaker's work from a contemporary, filmic and sonic point of view, have been released as a starting point for a program that will also be shown at the Cinema Truffaut and the Museu de l'Empordà. at the Cineclub Diòptria in Figueres.

Acció Santos, in Bòlit_PouRodó, is an exhibition that explores the relationship between the filmmaker Pere Portabella (Figueres, 1927) and the musician Carles Santos (Vinaròs, 1940-2017). A meeting that has led to the creation of free sound spaces and that has given rise to a fortnight of films that invent new ways of associating cinema with music, both from the point of view of listening, and from the point of view of the relationship between staging, narration and musical instruments. The works presented highlight a tension between space, image and sound, and invite us to focus on what would otherwise be inaudible or invisible. As viewers we are more accustomed to "reading" a visual close-up than a sound close-up. Santos and Portabella get rid of this traditional submission of sound to image from a transgressive poetics, which combines classical and contemporary music, subtle details and unexpected situations.

On February 9 at 6.30 pm, El Bòlit has scheduled a conference entitled "The diegetic music of Carles Santos in the cinema of Pere Portabella" by Ona Balló, which will take place at the La Mercè Cultural Center. We talk about diegetic music in cinema when a character listens to or plays music during the sequence. For Portabella and Santos it is the starting point to start working. There is always a underlying reason to introduce it, because it has an impact on the narrative. It is not illustrative, it acts. The presence of Carles Santos in Pere Portabella's cinema allows us to reflect on this unusual encounter between image and sound.

Gosar Poder, in Bòlit_StNicolau, is an unpublished audiovisual installation by Isaki Lacuesta (Girona, 1975). On April 25, 1970, the First Popular Festival of Catalan Poetry was held in the Gran Price Hall, the venue for dance, boxing and wrestling in Barcelona. It was a poetic party against the dictatorship, organized by the main clandestine parties, in solidarity with the labor movement and in support of political prisoners. No one expected about 4,000 people to attend. Part of this unprecedented recital was recorded in the film Catalan Poets (1970), directed by Pere Portabella. On October 5, 2020, the Teatre de la Biblioteca de Catalunya hosted a new recital to celebrate the anniversary of the First Popular Festival of Catalan Poetry, which featured the intervention of poets, artists and activists from different generations. The film Gosar poder (2021) records this new recital, assembled with images of gestures and spaces chosen by the poets, when asked what they wanted us to film in order to represent them.

For the first time, Gosar poder is presented here in the format of an audiovisual installation: a montage that desynchronizes and dissociates the ingredients of the film - word, sound, 1970s psychophonies, images from the new recital, portraits of the daily life of poets–, to invite the visitors of this exhibition to mentally go back as much as they please, as they dare.