digital repository

“Primera muerte” (First Death, 1969) is the first surviving piece of video art made in Spain. [...]. As Antoni Llena explains: ‘Ignorant of the technical care that the new medium required, let alone the status it would achieve by the end of the twentieth century, the authors didn’t think of preserving the tape and gave it up for lost, until some years ago a copy was found in a very precarious condition in the archives of TV3, which is the one that can be seen today.’ Televisió de Catalunya (TV3) had broadcast it in the programme “Galeria oberta”, but the tape was lost in 1987 when it was included in the first video retrospective, “La imagen sublime. Vídeo de creación en España (1970-1987)” , (The sublime image. Creative video in Spain, 1970–87), an exhibition that took place at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In 2010, and as a result of the research carried out by Blanca de la Torre and Imma Prieto for the exhibition “Video(S)torias”, which was shown at the Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo Artium, Vitoria, it was located within the TV3 archives. In 2014, the work was incorporated into the MACBA Collection and in January 2017 the Museum’s technical team restored the audio track. In May 2017, in a project curated by Imma Prieto for the Loop Barcelona Festival, dedicated on this occasion to the pioneers of video art, it was screened again in the place where it had been initially presented in 1969: the Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC), Barcelona./ [...] “Primera muerte” contains a choral narrative of everyday scenes recorded in the house where the four artists lived, the Jardí del Maduixer (carrer Clarassó on the El Maduixer estate, Barcelona), a place that at the end of the 1960s was behind the rise of ‘poor’, Conceptual and experimental art in the city. The video also incorporated the son of Sílvia Gubern and Jordi Galí, the daughter of a gypsy family from the neighbourhood and a chicken.. [See full text in: https://www.macba.cat/ca/art-artistes/artistes/llena-antoni-gubern-silvia-gali-jordi/primera-muerte]