The Magnetic Terrace 2021: A Vegetal Encounter
The Magnetic Terrace is back with open-air cinema and live music, a vegetal encounter that will take place every weekend through July and August on the Terrace at La Casa Encendida.
Inspired by the exhibition A Vegetal Encounter, this year the Magnetic Terrace invites audiences to explore humanity's relationship with nature throughout history. While we may be passionate about nature, we have not always treated it fairly or in a balanced manner.
The Saturday film programme features a selection of titles that are united by the imposing presence of the plant world.
The films selected highlight the overwhelming force of nature at its wildest, such as the all-powerful Amazon rainforest in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God. Others, such as Old Joy by Kelly Reichardt, present nature as a shelter and place to gather, and we even find nature as the mythical territory in which legends are forged, as in Tropical Malady by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
The film programme also addresses humanity's insatiable desire to control and monetise nature, with titles like Taming the Garden by Salomé Jashi, as well as exploring dystopian realities in which plants rebel against humans, encapsulated by films such as Little Shop of Horrors and Little Joe.
Meanwhile, the Sunday concerts provide a listening space in which to rethink our relationship with nature and the way in which we understand it. These concerts will also be live streamed through the YouTube channel of La Casa Encendida.
The meditative sounds of the harpist Angélica Salvi take us on a journey to a wild world, unspoilt by human action, while the Peruvian artist Ale Hop, who creates her music by observing insects, highlights the need to change how we relate to other species. Other music proposals in the programme invite us to respect natural cycles. For example, through her album Aura Aura, Bikôkô will show Magnetic Terrace audiences how African music is integrated into our everyday lives, modifying and conditioning our existence. We will also have the opportunity to discover the remote worlds of artists like Verde Prato, who sings in Basque and injects the Basque oral tradition into her songs about love, family and friendship, as well as fear, absence and desire.
The festival also presents other gazes, such as those of Molero, a Venezuelan artist who has lived in Barcelona for many years and critiques Eurocentric myths about the rainforest, re-appropriating the utopian language of soundtracks. There is also room for the idea of metamorphosis courtesy of Ikram Bouloum, a multifaceted artist with Moroccan parents who was born in Torelló and explores a radical sound that destroys the implants created by the type of dichotomy that is associated with cultural shock.
The Angolan producer DJ Nigga Fox presents us with his unique interpretation of sound as an uninterrupted and independent organic entity forged out of the diaspora. Lastly, we celebrate the arrival of a post-anthropocentric future with DJ Marcelle and her compositions that mix and fuse genres to create uncharted soundscapes.
