What were the starting points and initial ideas behind Mudanza?
The García-Lorca Foundation. It organises every year a temporary exhibition where about twenty international artists are invited to the García-Lorca family house in Granada, “la Huerta de San Vicente”.
I replied to the invitation from Hans Ulrich Obrist, the responsible of the exhibition, with a proposal: to completely empty the house of furniture and objects, in order to leave only the living space and the silence.
It is about a quiet eviction, taking the furniture out with a meticulous calm, a tale of guided rhythm until the total emptiness. For this sequence of the removal I used the steadycam, closer to the human eye due to its instability in the steady shots and in the movements that require stability, which in an almost imperceptible way influences the spectator’s view.
For the sequence of the empty apartment the travelling was essential. Change of rhythm and point of view. The place is what is “moving”. It is a movement or journey what is offered to the spectator, overshadowing the scenery. The space becomes the place for the spectator to go along his experience and demands.
In films, the significant absences acquire always a strong presence from the outside. The emptiness of the house is occupied by the poet without fetishistic interferences, without spotlights or expressionists effects, capturing the sun light from the outside with big mirror-screens. As simple as this.
Could you maybe share an important/funny/moving/surprising anecdote related to the making-of the film?
The museum-house of the García-Lorcas in Granada, in “la Huerta de San Vicente”, is part of the Spanish national heritage. Its conservation and maintenance is carried out by the Andalusian Government, Granada´s city council and county council. So as you can easily imagine there’s an impregnable bureaucratic wall that makes impossible to take even one piece of furniture out of the house. By chance the responsible of the conservation of the museum-house came back just in the right moment, after a month of absence leave due to a strong depression. He was happy to meet me and after a pleasant and euphoric first contact, he asked me about how things were going on. I explained him about the refusal from the official institutions to move the furniture and that therefore there was no chance to make it. He asked me for some time to think about it. After ten minutes he came back with the solution: he would give the order to evacuate the furniture from the house using the argument that some repair, painting and wiring works needed to be done. This is how it was possible to shot Mudanza. Thanks to an anarchist and revolutionary to whom I will always be deeply grateful.
What do you do when not making films?
When I´m not shooting I´m thinking about another project for which I always need time. I´m also the president of a foundation (Fundación Alternativas), that tries to bring solutions to the big economic, environmental, social and cultural changes that we are experiencing on an international level.
What would you like to say to your audience before seeing Mudanza?
To enjoy it, and my best wishes for 2010.
What at you currently working on?
Several projects for three museums in Madrid, Brussels and Berlin… And my next film.