Pere Noguera: the archive as a work of art

As an epilogue to the year dedicated to the centenary of amateur cinema, the Filmoteca de Catalunya presents 'Pere Noguera. Guerra Family. Archive Material'.

Pere Noguera (La Bisbal d'Empordà, 1941), a key figure in Catalan conceptual art, was a pioneer in the appropriation and re-signification of photographic and film archives. On this occasion, based on two archival collections—Els Encants, Barcelona and the Guerra Family, La Bisbal d'Empordà—Noguera shows how fragments of forgotten memory acquire new readings through found footage, a technique that reuses existing material to endow it with new discourses and meanings.

The project based on the archive “Família Guerra, La Bisbal d'Empordà” has its origin in a set of 16mm reels from a Dutch family, acquired from a rag shop in La Bisbal. The captured images, intimate and tragic, show family summer scenes from the thirties and forties that coexist with footage from the Second World War. Noguera's aim is not only to show these images, but to strip them of their original narrative to offer a new, more critical reading.

Raquel Garcia Ulldemolins i Pere Noguera jugant a tocar el piano. Casa-taller de Pere Noguera

On the other hand, the Encants, Barcelona archive is made up of photographs and clichés from the thirties, forties and fifties, imbued with the ideology and aesthetics of Francoism.

The exhibition, open until February 28, allows us to revisit Pere Noguera's audiovisual work and his fascination with cinema and archives. This fascination began during his childhood in La Bisbal d'Empordà, which in the 1950s had three active cinemas. In this context, Noguera began to collect what would become his own archive with trailers, postcards and screenings from the time. Later, after revisions, rereadings, deconstructions and fragmentations, these objects have left behind their original meaning to acquire a new symbolic charge that demonstrates the fragility of memory and the construction of historical narratives.

After its presentation at the Filmoteca, other spaces, such as the Bòlit in Girona , the Terracotta Museu de la Bisbal and Can Mario in Palafrugell , will vindicate Noguera's trajectory during 2025.

Postals Família Guerra. Arxiu Pere Noguera