Urban Entourage

“Perfection is a fiction we suffer from,” filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine remarked in their lecture at Columbia GSAPP this Monday. In contrast to glossy, pre-occupancy PR imagery, Bêka and Lemoine foreground the labor of maintenance, the decay of buildings, the impact of climate, and most importantly, the lives of ordinary people. Presented in their lecture as an ever-growing diagram of interconnected points, the couple’s approach aims to expose the entanglements and dependencies that dominant architectural discourse would rather leave unquestioned. Bêka and Lemoine’s presentation culminated with their latest project, a ten-hour, ten-city, ten-part “cinematographic fresco,” Homo Urbanus. While the duo focus Homo Urbanus on the relation between bodies and public space, Bêka and Lemoine’s own relationship to their cinematographic subjects seemed to become increasingly asymmetrical. In Homo Urbanus the duo no longer speak with the people they film. Each section of the film is given a quasi-scientific name—Homo Urbanus Tokyoitus or Seoulianus—and filled with foota…