[REC]ollections. Life through Home Movies

For more than a century, home cinema has been capturing fragments of everyday life and has become a repository of images that reflect our collective memory. This exhibition celebrates over one hundred years of home cinema as an audiovisual heritage of immense sociological, historical and aesthetic value.

[REC]ollections. Life through Home Movies traces over a century of home filmmaking and explores why we film ourselves, alongside the evolution of technology, from early film cameras to mobile phones. This exhibition brings to light previously unseen and sometimes counter-hegemonic stories and footage, offering alternative narratives of both past and present ways of life. By constructing an alternative chronicle of the past century through the eyes of anonymous families in which anyone might see themselves, the exhibition invites us to reflect on the relationship between image, reality and memory,  and to reconsider our connection with the camera.

The exhibition makes a powerful case for the value of shared everyday life and family-sourced audiovisual materials – those ordinary or celebratory scenes captured using different formats that have evolved over the years and become memories for future generations to access. These powerful testimonies of social change and expressions of their time raise recurring themes and interests that help us understand how people used and continue to use the camera, and how they once presented and continue to present themselves in front of it.

On the other hand, it also traces a hundred years of technological evolution, from 16 mm film to mobile phones, taking in Super 8 and VHS along the way. It explores the construction of memory and emotional ties, including from a gender perspective; offers an overview of the most recurring themes and how they are approached, along with related forms of expression; examines their reuse in contemporary audiovisual and artistic practices, as well as their appropriation by today’s filmmakers; and analyses how all of this is interwoven with the communicative practices of social media and the internet. This is an exhibition that helps us understand the relationship between image, reality, memory and art.