Vilafamés a través dels ulls del MACVAC

Abstract

The report, regardless of being an audiovisual production, has required many hours to deal with all the information that formed the amalgam of data, studies and opinions about each of the minimum components of the work. This production is not only a report that talks solely about the current situation of Vilafamés since the creation and consolidation of the Contemporary Art Museum Vicent Aguilera Cerni (from now on MACVAC by its Catalan initials), but it addresses the construction of the current personality of Vilafamés. It is a coverage that aims to understand how a town of barely 2,000 inhabitants, linked to the traditional primary sector, became a cultural epicentre with influence both in Spain and in the world, capable of hosting the 1st International Meeting of Art Critics. This transformation is clearly related to the creation of the Popular Museum of Contemporary Art in 1972, despite the fact that the cultural project had already begun to take shape some years before. The promoter of such a museum was Vicente Aguilera Cerni, a pioneering cultural critic and one of the great figures of Spanish art criticism. A man who saw in Vilafamés a perfect opportunity of turning the town into a cultural centre that would radiate artistic feelings and attract tourism. Thus, the focus of the report is not so much on describing what Vilafamés is, but rather how Vilafamés has become what it is today. Keeping this in mind, the first step we took was to catch a whiff of all the information we could find in the pre-production stage. The MACVAC has its own department that manages the entity: the CIDA (for its initials in Spanish, International Centre for Artistic Documentation), from where we borrowed doctoral theses, catalogues, reports, studies and old photographs that could help us contextualise the previous years. From all this information, we knew, more or less, what the main elements of the history and the process were, what people and events marked the evolution of the Museum. For example, in 1974 the first General Urban Development Plans were drawn up in Vilafamés, architectural and heritage studies that designed the formal characteristics that the new houses or the reconstructions of the existing ones should have. While we were unaware of these Development Plans, the information was obtained from the CIDA, and we decided to add this information as an important topic in the audiovisual work. As 18 for the choice of interviews and sources of information, it should be noted that we did not only talk to the sources on the day of the interview. We spoke at length with Xavier Allepuz, historian of Vilafamés; Vicente Benet, ex-mayor of Vilafamés; and Manolo Marzà, the first employee of the Museum. All of them provide us with enormous amounts of information even prior to the interview. In fact, a large part of the production process involved choosing which information we should keep and which we should dismiss among so many statements or journalistic threads/focuses to pull from. Turning to the already mentioned pre-production process, it must be noted that the technical capabilities we had were somewhat limited, as we were only two and had to work on every process in this paper. Thus, we agreed to use two cameras to carry out the report and to provide a variety of shots for the different interviews. It should be noted that, although we considered doing the interviews indoors, we decided to do them in outdoor spaces that would give evidence of the urban landscape of Vilafamés. With the exception of Vicente Benet, who is 96 years old and has reduced mobility, and Abel Ibáñez, due to inclement weather, the rest of the interviews were conducted outdoors. Another noteworthy point is the way we decided to organise the workdays. Instead of doing the report on individual, separate days, we decided to spend 2- 3 days together and work intensively during that period of time. In the first stage, we combined the interviews with Vicente Benet and Manolo Marzà into two consecutive days, and we spent the remaining time on recording cover shots and writing the literary script. In our second meeting, we conducted the interviews with Jose Pons, Rosalia Torrent and Xavier Allepuz in 3 consecutive days, in addition to taking resource shots; and the third batch was exclusively for recording Abel Ibáñez, and also taking some cover shots of tourists visiting the town of Vilafamés. Although we were able to cover the different interviews on consecutive days, the planning differed, due to the impossibility of meeting Xavier Allepuz on a single day. Despite this, we managed to organise the agenda in order to spend our work and material lending time in a better way. In addition, a relevant fact is that we declined to interview a source, having already contacted her. The focus we were giving to the audiovisual work did not fit with the testimony of Amparo 19 Domínguez, daughter of a painter with great social relevance in the village. In fact, our main idea was to contact two artists who still live in the village: Mirando d'Amico and Agustín de Celis, but we were unable to reach an agreement with them as they lived in Madrid and were reluctant to give us an interview. The pre-production stage was, perhaps, the most difficult due to the aforementioned complexity of the material involved, its volume and the formal characteristics of the report, which had to last less than 16 minutes and more than 14. Thus, the approach chosen in said stage is linked to the idea that the museum of contemporary art is the socio-economic engine of Vilafamés and the cornerstone of the town. Furthermore, a mentality based on the architectural and patrimonial respect for the old town, based also on the drafting of the 1974 General Urban Development Plans, is built. In other words, the approach we want to show is the direct relationship between what happened years ago in order to fully understand what is happening nowadays. For this, the structure of the report is quite simple: firstly an introduction based on how it is nowadays and we expose in a brief way the current state of Vilafamés, to quickly make a retrospective of the late 60s when Aguilera Cerni, promoter and founder of the MACVAC, arrived to Vilafamés. From this point, we go through the process of construction and consolidation of the Museum and how it triggered the reconstruction of the old town that gives it its characteristic and beautiful nuance. Once everything related to the museum has been dealt with, we come back to the tourist phenomenon that Vilafamés is experiencing nowadays, analysing then its problems and characteristics, which are, in turn, consequences (whether good or bad) directly related to everything explained previously in the report. To support the script, we rely on studies and statistics that we cite in the report itself, although there is more material that has influenced the paper but is not directly quoted. In terms of what has been cited, we refer to a study carried out in 1980 on the economic and social repercussions of the Museum on the town. Named Un Museo y un Pueblo (‘A Museum and a People’), it was carried out by the economist Aurelio Martínez and provides very relevant data such as the inflation of the price of houses, of the square metre, or various failures in the museum's strategies that endangered its status as an economic engine and left it as an outdated project. In addition, we also asked MACVAC for information 20 regarding the number of people visiting the museum over the years and they enclosed the information we provided in the report. In the same way, we asked the Vilafamés Tourist Office for specific numbers of people visiting Vilafamés, providing only the number of people visiting the Tourist Office, but not the total number of visitors arriving in the town. As far as unquoted material is concerned, Beatriz Guttmann's doctoral thesis "El Museo de Vilafamés: un hecho insólito" has served as inspiration and even as a resource at times when we lost the focus of the report. Once we had all the material ready to edit, post-production was the finishing touch to the report, mainly to have a clear result after so much time working on it. In terms of resources, we chose the song Lemon Tree by the band Fool's Garden as the soundtrack, and we prepared a visual resource based on making the same shot that we found in old pictures, trying to recreate them within the current state of the buildings. In this way, we wanted to highlight the evolution of the beauty of the buildings and of the whole old complex. To sum up, we think it is important to try and discern the difficult moments, such as deciding whether some information is useful or not. Therefore, in our eagerness to expose a sequence of facts, we have also wanted to pay a tribute to great figures of art such as Aguilera Cerni, a key figure in the evolution of Vilafamés and without whom, perhaps, the town of Vilafamés would not be what it is today. However, as Rosalia Torrent states, "we cannot make science fiction".