jordi colomer - projects

news!

bio / cv

projects

contact

press

eng | fr | esp | cat

POBLE NOU (2013)

Poble Nou is an old industrial neighbourhood of Barcelona, constantly evolving. This parking is one of the "outlaw" zones often found in Colomer’s work: deserts, but also urban zones such as abandoned roofs, investigated and reactivated...

PROHIBIDO CANTAR / NO SINGING (2012)

In Prohibido cantar / No Singing a few characters make a gambling den where they offer entertainment games, tricks, love and food at low prices. The action takes place close to a dusty road, on the same plot of land and during the time in which a great private city was planned, with 32 casinos,

L'AVENIR (2011)

In April 2011 Jordi Colomer presents new work at the Centre for Fine Arts, BOZAR: L'Avenir ("The Future"), a large-scale project based on Charles Fourier's 19th-century Phalanstère. Fourier did not draw detailed plans for this utopian building, which was never built; in his writings, however, he planned and described it in great detail. It was intended to offer its chosen inhabitants a life and an environment painstakingly constructed on the basis of the harmony of time and space...

CRIER SUR LES TOITS (2011)

Neutralising the separation between public and exhibition space, 24 anonymous posters at the entrance of the show exhort the audience to "shout on the rooftops"...

WHAT WILL COME (2010-2011)

A triptych films that deals with the relationship between urban space and human activity. Shot in Co-op City (the Bronx), Levittown (N.Y) and The Hamptons, 3 examples of North-American Utopia: the Gated Community, the Suburbia, the Holidays. Each film articulates itself around a character who re-enacts his own activity.

THE ISTANBUL MAP (2010)

Some - like Anita Tocopilla's character here - have the habit of visiting the roofs of every city, as though they were performing an act of recognition...

AVENIDA IXTAPALUCA (HOUSES FOR MEXICO) (2009)

Ixtapaluca is one of the cities of the outskirts of Mexico DF. Suddenly, an urbanization for 80.000 people living in small identical houses appeared there. The neighborhoods distinguish each other only by the color of the facades. However, life runs in the streets and people debate themselves in transforming that imposing geometric organization into a real city. They place provisional markets, build apartments on top of the roof, use the gardens, paint the houses in a different color…

HEROES (PARA MEXICO) (2009)

This series of twelve photographs Héroes (for Mexico) (2009), registers groups of piñatas just as they are displayed in the warehouses where they are sold...

EN LA PAMPA (2008)

Can we inhabit the desert? Can we inhabit a space with fiction?...

POZO ALMONTE (2008)

This series of photographs was taken in the Atacama desert, in northern Chile...

BABELKAMER (2007)

Originally, this “Babble Room” (babbelziek kamer) was set up in a shopping centre in Brussels—the city of language par excellence, one of the European community’s Towers of Babel and the capital of a country, Belgium, cut across by linguistic divisions . In a booth with tiny windows fitted out as a living room, furnished caravan-style and painted red, two people sit face to face, one a Flemish speaker and the other a French speaker, conversing in sign language.

This film consists of a succession of still images from a long tracking shot in Second Street in the Rhodia workers’ housing estate in Roussillon, near Lyon. The camera records a series of houses and gardens, all identical, giving us a glimpse of the fixtures and fittings and habits of the occupants. Against this uniform backdrop, individuals appear fleetingly, performing everyday acts or playing music. The only event to disturb this apparently unremarkable panorama is...

NO FUTURE (2006)

A black car drives along the road as night falls on an expressway; mounted on its roof is a blinking neon sign like those of circuses or casinos, with a question and an answer, albeit inconclusive: “No? Future!” As dawn breaks, it stops in the city centre. The driver, with heavily made-up eyes wearing a military-style jacket, gets out and begins to...

CINECITO (2006)

ARABIAN STARS (2005)

Shot at the beginning of 2005 during a stay in the Yemen, the film Arabian Stars stages Yemenite citizens crossed according to the journey. The characters agreed to get caught up, to walk in front of the camera by holding cardboard colored posters, on which are handwritten in Arabic the names of famous, real and fictitious, international and local characters (Michael Jackson, Pikachu, James Bond ou Zinedine Zidane but also the singer Abo Bakr Saalem...

PAPAMOVIL (2005)

The Popemobile, one of the Prototipos (2), is the central focus of a series of photographs exhibited as a slide show. In a rapidly changing neighbourhood in Barcelona, the model of the vehicle is placed in the road: pedestrians walk by without stopping, some slowing to look, intrigued, others posing for a photograph...

UN CRIME (2004)

a crime whose real motives are not yet completely known we think has been recently discovered in couville near cherbourg…  the station master, alerted by an employee that a nauseating smell was coming from a box placed in the left-luggage office said to open it…
a corpse in decomposition was inside…

PROTOTIPOS (1) (2004)

Seven white cardboard models of vehicles are lined up on a long, narrow table illuminated by bare light bulbs...

PROTOTIPOS (2) (2004)

Five cardboard models of cars are placed on the floor...

ANARCHITEKTON (2002-2004)

Anarchitekton is the generic title of a video series made as a work in progress: Barcelona, Bucharest, Brasilia, Osaka are the first stops on this journey. A peculiar character, Idroj Sanicne travels the city contaminating the streets with fiction. The models of the buildings are like grotesque banners, utopian provocations, or playful flags. Idroj runs following the rhythm of static images which, paradoxically, reflect a sense of unflagging movement...

PÈRE COCO AND SOME LOST OBJECTS IN 2001 (2002)

Carrying a large bag on his back and dressed in black, Père Coco wanders throughout the city finding objects lost the previous year. This video shows him as he makes his way around the shipyard city of Saint-Nazaire, finding around 100 objects in the most unusual places. Père Coco belongs to that family of characters which are used to frighten little children, such as Père Fouettard...

THE CITIES (2002)

Hanging from a cornice, a girl in pyjamas makes her way along the outside façade of a pretty tall building. She embodies the modern heroine, dangerously confronted to the city. In the background, the image of the metropolis changes at great speed, like yet another character with multiple faces, an accelerated echo of Malevitch’s architektons and Hans Richter’s animations.  Everything happens...

LE DORTOIR (2002)

In an apartment block on the city outskirts, everybody is asleep. It is the day after a big party. Le Dortoir visits each of the 12 storeys of the building one by one in an ascending movement, shifting from night to day and covering 24 hours in one single sequence. Motionless actors and a camera gliding through space, Le Dortoir is built like a contemporary vanitas in motion, in which...

FUEGOGRATIS (2002)

A young couple drives through the night in a gold car. Seeing a large billboard announcing “Fuegogratis” [free fire], they head towards a huge fire which, like a shopping centre eternally in flames, a cornucopia in the middle of nowhere, produces valuable items: a bed, a fridge, a table, a washing machine, etc, all of them made in cardboard. With the car packed full, our young heroes...

LES JUMELLES (2001)

Inside a theatre, two twin sisters live in the space separating the stalls from the stage. In front of huge mirrors, they dress and undress as they try on all the costumes stored backstage. Meanwhile, the audience starts to enter the theatre and takes their seats, awaiting for the performance to begin. When the spectators suddenly disappear, one of the twins gathers the clothes they have left behind...

On a projection screen, like an animated blackboard, Alfabet’s profile pronounces a discourse spitting out hundreds of objects at high speed. Simultaneously and in a double voice, Alfabet recites an extract from “La Vie mode d’emploi” by Georges Perec, describing the objects strewn around an apartment on the morning after a party...

A character plays fragments from Paul Dukas’ L’Apprenti Sorcier in a piano entirely made from cardboard. As he plays, he smokes, puffing out clouds of smoke. Later, he carefully, almost caressingly, cleans the dust covered piano. Dust, smoke and music create the essential – and fugitive– trio of this story. The artist Carlos Pazos plays the role of Pianito. He has also acted in...

Each of the 8 floors of the aparthotel Urbis, in Valencia, has three apartments that are exactly alike. A total of 24 identical apartments, identical green carpeting, identical kitchenette, identical beige bathtub. The elevator stops in each floor and the 24 actors and actresses that play “La Marquesa Rosalinda” in the nearby Teatro Rialto, every evening, bid each other good night...

A, B, C, ETC. (1997-1999)

A night train through the endless outskirts of a city; or a history of modern architecture for children built with cookies, matches, nails and little make-up cases and boxes of cheese portions...

SOME STARS (1997-1999)

EL LLOC I LES COSES (1996)