With Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine

Moderated by Miriam De Rosa and Susanne Franco

After a five-minute screening of Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine’s 2018 film Homo Urbanus Venetianus (part of the film series Homus Urbanus: A Citymatographic Odyssey, Bêka discusses the work with  Miriam De Rosa (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia) and Susanne Franco (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia). After the constraints of lockdown and social distancing that brutally transformed urban space to its strict minimum, where isolated individuals merely cohabit, this film offers a vibrant tribute to something we have been most cruelly deprived of: public space. Taking the form of a free-wheeling journey around the world (10 films, 10 cities), the Homus Urbanus series invites the viewer to observe in detail the multiple forms and complex interactions bonding people and their urban environments. These films explore our condition as a human animal and the way in which the city—this artificial environment that we build around us every day like an extension of our contemporary bodies—shapes and conditions us. Taken on the fly, these visual notes look at urban man not only within his group but also in the depths of his solitude, redesigning the outlines of the city according to a kind of emotional geography. More than mapping out an area, the idea is to allow a city to speak through the ways in which it is used, in order to show the shifting nature of its human landscape and to understand what local singularities remain in the context of the wholesale globalization of our urban lifestyles. The Venice film frames the city’s fragile balance, as well as its unique social and ecosystem, before the constant challenges of mass tourism and high tide. The conversation discusses Bêka and Lemoine’s film-making process and practice, urban architecture, walking, and vulnerability.