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Heinz Emigholz

Mamani in El Alto

Documentaire | 4k | couleur | 95:0 | Allemagne | 2022

The civil engineer and architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre (*1971), has designed more than 60 building projects in the Bolivian city of El Alto since 2008, which mock the norms of a formulaic modern architecture shaped and enforced with global aspirations by the Bauhaus. Mamani comes from a humble background and belongs to the Aymara people. His self-taught architecture is a counter-utopia that grew out of local usages and opens up a view of preferences other than sparseness and global stylistic adherence. The film shows many of the “cholets” he built with their magnificent ballrooms in their urban setting. Mamani became the founder of neo-Andean architecture.

Born in 1948 near Bremen in Germany, Heinz Emigholz trained first as a draftsman before studying philosophy and literature in Hamburg. He began filmmaking in 1968 and has worked since 1973 as a filmmaker, artist, writer and producer in Germany and the USA. In 1974 he started his encyclopaedic drawing series “The Basis of Make-Up”. He looks back on numerous exhibitions, retrospectives, lectures and publications. In 1984 he started his film series “Photography and beyond”. He had held a professorship in Experimental Filmmaking at the Universität der Künste Berlin 1993-2013, and co-founded the Institute for Time-based Media and the Art and Media program, there. In 2003 Filmgalerie 451 started an edition of all his films on DVD. Publications a.o.: Krieg der Augen, Kreuz der Sinne (War of Eyes, Cross of Senses), Seit Freud gesagt hat, der Künstler heile seine Neurose selbst, heilen die Künstler ihre Neurosen selbst (Since Freud Said That the Artist Heals His Neuroses Himself, Artists Have Been Healing Their Neuroses Themselves), Normalsatz – Siebzehn Filme (Ordinary Sentence – Seventeen Films) and Das schwarze Schamquadrat (The Black Sqare of Shame) (all four books were published at Verlag Martin Schmitz); “Die Basis des Make-Up (I) and (II)”, “Der Begnadete Meier”, “Kleine Enzyklopädie der Photographie” (Small Encyclopaedia of Photography) and “Die Basis des Make-Up (III)” (in Die Republik No. 68-71, 76-78, 89-91, 94-97 and 123-125); Sense of Architecture with more than 600 photographs. Heinz Emigholz is a member of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin.