WORKS

GLIMPSE OF THE UNIVERSE
2012

GLIMPSE OF THE UNIVERSE is a film by Eugènia Balcells, in conversation with the astronomer Marc Balcells, director of the isaac Newton Group of Telescopes at the roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Canary islands).

LIGHT YEARS
A walk through the exhibition in Tabacalera, Madrid, 2012.

LIGHT YEARS is made up of the multimedia installation UNIVERSE, complemented by the film GLIMPSE OF THE UNIVERSE, the mural HOMAGE TO THE ELEMENTS, the installation FREQUENCIES, and the VISITOR’S SPACE.

HOMAGE TO THE ELEMENTS
International Year of the Periodic Table

Telenoticies, TV3 – 02-03-2019

HOMAGE TO THE ELEMENTES
2009
Installation time-lapse.
Maxine Greene High School, Martin Luther King Campus,

Homage to the Elements offers us an evocation, and fosters our reflections on the essence of matter, its energy, its light.

FREQUENCIES
2009
Exhibition LIGHT YEARS in Panama, 2017.

The installation FREQUENCIES allows us to experience hands on the atomic heartbeat of matter. It takes us inside a poetry written in this fundamental alphabet. It lets us touch the spectral lines, and walk there, observe the splitting of the lines and detect the most subtle atomic quantum states.

FREQUENCIES AND HOMAGE TO THE ELEMENTS
A walk through the exhibition, FREQUENCIES in MACUF, 2010-2011.

The video installation FREQUENCIES is an endless film in which the luminous fingerprint that each element emits merges with those from others, thus delivering a metaphor of the origin of the universe. In HOMAGE TO THE ELEMENTS The artist’s creative view of light and matter has reunited two icons of physics and chemistry in a single image for the first time: the emission spectra and the periodic table.

JARDI DE LLUM (GARDEN OF LIGHT)
In 2003 this piece was permanently installed in Ciutat Meridiana stop of the 11th line of the Metro of Barcelona.

Contemporary “gardens of light”, virtual, shadow theaters, that suggest visions of a magical world.
A slight movement of the shadows of flowers and leaves gives life to these imaginary gardens.
It suggests the garden as a meeting place between the human being and nature and between nature and art.

RODA DO TEMPO  (WHEEL OF TIME)
2001,  multimedia installation

It is in fact an immense wheel, millenary invention, with all kinds of objects from our daily life, from a molding, a hat, a cage, a suitcase and even a frying pan, all moving counterclockwise, in some kind of return.
The idea is a clock of all things, without categories. We are in another time, where objects mark the hours, other hours. The fact that this piece was hanging so high in relation to the ground gave a impressive sense to the plural representation of time, linear or circular, or archeological, or from physics, or cultural, producing a magical effect.

ANAR-HI ANANT (ON AND ON)
2000
Multimedia installation.

ON AND ON is a work of synthesis. From a simple everyday object a poetic experience is reached, with provocative images, almost organic, and a rhythmic sound that suggests the ocean and our breathing. We are invited, as Blake suggested, to walk through the doors of perception and reach the place where everything is as it is, infinite.

UN ESPAI PROPI  (A SPACE OF ONE’S OWN)
2000
Multimedia installation.
Music: Barbara Held
Actress: Gemma Sin

Text selection: Nora Catelli This installation, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s work, presents an image of woman constantly recreating herself from the primal elements. It is a circular space created by a series of paper scrolls, 4m. in height, with fragments of Woolf’s texts that could be read alternatively from the inside and the outside of the circle.

BRINDIS (TOAST)
1999
Multimedia installation. Music: Barbara Held

As wishes come true in a fairy tale, this large multiple toast that invokes abundance. The glasses contain all sorts of objects as signs or indications of the gifts to be materialized. 
When joined in a toast, the edges of the glasses form a figure eight, symbol of the infinite, which is repeated in a mathematical structure forming a mosaic that could be extended in all directions. This matrix is the crystallization of the invisible web that links, unity in multiplicity, connection in diversity.

VESTIT DE LLUM (DRESS OF LIGHT)
1999
Audiovisual installation,  music: Peter Van Riper

This “Dress of light” is a sort of nightgown that refers metaphorically to the fact of dreaming and suggests the limit between matter and energy.
The visual narration starts in a beam of light that is visible in the dress suspended and turning in the air. The light projects from the floor into the mirror a series of objects/images, going through the immaterial cloth of the silk gauze of the dress projecting its shadow in the screen above.

VEURE LA LLUM
1996

This exhibition is composed of two installations: COLOR FIELDS and TRASPASSAR LIMITS (Transcending limits).
COLOR FIELDS deals with light as the generator of space, and explores pure color and its different vibrations.
TRANSCENDIG LIMITS refers to light as the creator of images and acts as a metaphor for the brain.

TRANSCENDING LIMITS (TRASPASSAR LIMITS)
1995
Audiovisual installation with a special 6 screen structure in the shape of a cube 2x2x2 m.   Sound: Peter Van Riper.

TRASPASSAR LIMITS proposes to move across and beyond the rigid boundaries of dual thinking, offering the possibility to experience this complex space where opposites coexist, are confronted and dissolve into each other. This work is also a metaphor of the interactions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain: analytical/synthetic, linguistic/symbolic, arithmetic/spatial, linear/parallel,… while the fusion in the central space of the piece suggests a greater possible integration.

DESCANSAN COMO EN LA CASA MATERNA I and II
1993. Installations.
With artist/musician Sjabbe Van Selfhout.

It is a multiple portrait, a vision of the many aspects of our being, it is like a dance of different characters. In the negatives the shadows transform into light, which seems to emerge from the interior of the body, suggesting the idea of human energy, aura or spirit.

PORTABLE ALBUM
1993

PORTABLE ALBUM is a clear plastic coat with postcards of women.
“I carry in me all the women, the well known ones, the unknown, the young, the old, the wise, the ones that don’t know much…and I carry them with honor and gratefulness…”

SEEING THE DANCE
1991.
Multimedia installation, 12 channel Video, music by Peter Van Riper.

The installation consists of a large spiral formed by 12 rear projection screens with a mirrored sphere at the center unifying all the images in a luminous spiral.
SEEING THE DANCE shows an alchemical vision of reality in which everything is like a great dance. Black and white images from Buñuel and Dali’s L’ Age d’Or, filmed in the area of Cape Creus, are superimposed with contemporary images of nature.

EXPOSURE TIME
LA CAIXA COLLECTION
1989.
Multimedia installation    Sound: Peter Van Riper

Among the sand and the rocks on the beach where the Olympic Village was being built, Eugènia Balcells found remains of all kinds from buildings that had been subjected to continual erosion by the sea and revealed a past so recent in time that this discovery suggested a vision of our own ruins.
The installation is been conceived as a diorama, a stage within a time capsule where the found fragments are on display. The sea as symbol of the origin, perpetual destruction, and re-creation of the world.

It has been exhibited at the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid

BARCELONA POSTCARDS OF POSTCARDS
AJUNTAMENT DE BARCELONA COLLECTION
1991   This large mural consists of 9 mosaics, 4,5 m x 3 m each, made with 6.318 different postcards. Commissioned by the Ajuntament de Barcelona, it was installed in the Forum Barcelona in 2004.

This work is a 40 meters accordion of 9 giant “postcards”and it offers a journey that starts with the name of Barcelona and goes from the sea to the mountain of Tibidabo.
This work creates a new image in which the whole is at the same time a part and it preserves the collective memory in a sort of contemporary archeology, an homage to the city and its inhabitants.

LIBERTY, A SYMBOLIC PUZZLE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA GOVERNMENT
1986   A mural composed of 2 elements of 3 x 2,5 m each, with 834 different postcards of the Statue of Liberty.  Statue of Liberty Museum, New York, USA.

“Liberty, a Symbolic Puzzle” is a mosaic made with 834 different postcards of the Statue of Liberty that organized by different shades of colors form the digital image of the Statue.
This project was commissioned in 1986 on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the Statue of Liberty, and it is part of the permanent exhibition in the museum at the base of the Statue.

Permanently on display at the Statue of Liberty Museum, NY

TV WEAVE
REINA SOFÍA MUSEUM COLLECTION, MADRID
1985.  Audiovisual Installation.   Music by Peter Van Riper
A wall of 42 TV sets with the screens covered with black tape leaving thin horizontal lines.

This piece shows television as an electronic weaving with its lines constantly changing as they are scanned by electron beams. It explores perception, the threshold between abstract dot patterns and the forming of an image. The music is played on suspended cut aluminum baseball bats in relationship to the changing lines of glowing dots.

FOR / AGAINST
1983
Format: S8  Color film  Magnetic sound   Duration: 3 min.  Digital version.

Animation film, produced with images taken from American television. It captures, in a subliminal way, the violence of information and advertising messages in commercial TV.

FROM THE CENTER
1982, 12 channel videoinstallation     Sound: Peter Van Riper

It is a circular monument, a vision of Manhattan, a contemplation of natural and urban energies, evoking primitive architectures and ancestral symbols using multiple angles from macro to micro looking in different directions but always from the same fixed point (the roof of the loft where the artist was living at the time). This fixed point is symbolized by a stone placed in the middle of the circle.

FLIGHT
1981
Video score ¾ ” U matic NTSC, color, digital version.
2018 – Bluray Edición 7 copies  Flight – 8’33”  Variation 1  – 4’13”  Variation 2  – 3’26”  Variation 3  – 2’51”

Video score consisting of the observation of a flight of pigeons through the lines of the musical staff. The birds take off and fly around, circling in the sky until they finally land where they started.
The three variations are electronic transformations of the original score.

CLEAR MUSIC
1981   Video-Score / clear book, 11 pages 
2018 – Edition of 7 copies video Bluray, 11 min, with Barbara Held.

Clear Music is a score/book consisting of 11 transparent plastic pages containing clear objects of different shapes that move freely relating to the lines of the musical staff. The musician/performer interprets the various configurations, distortions and reflections as musical notations. For the performance these images are projected in a large format over the wall of the space.

INDIAN CIRCLE
1981
Vídeo, ¾, NTSC, color,  30min.  Music: Peter Van Riper.  Digital.

A collaboration with musician Peter Van Riper, this 30 minute tape is an unedited action response improvisation between the sound performance and the camera work.
Space in time, constant change, energy flow: the great dance of everything. Immersed in sound.
From a center the camera scanning with no predetermined objective, always searching, encountering and responding, weaving, following invisible lines.

GOING THROUGH LANGUAGES
1981   two channel video
U matic ¾”, NTSC, color, 28 min. Digital version.
In collaboration with Noni Benegas, poet, and Marta Moya, anthropologist.

Two channel video that explores the contrast between the public language of TV; in this case the image of a woman presented in the program “Miss Universe 1987” and the personal and intimate visual language of two women at home.

OPHELIA
1979    Installation
30 series of 16 images each mounted in 1,60 x 1,10 m. panels

There is also a publication with a selection of 37 xerox prints.
OPHELIA is a project of multiple variations on an image, in this case John Everett Millai´s Ophelia, using a Xerox 9200.
The question is: Which one is Ophelia? Are all of them Ophelia? or maybe none of them is Ophelia?

BOY MEETS GIRL
MACBA COLLECTION, BARCELONA
1978    Format: 16 mm. Color film Duration: 10 min.

In BOY MEETS GIRL the screen is permanently divided in two parts by a vertical axis: in the left there is a fast succession of images of women and in the right of images of men. The film is made from a large amount of images taken from newspapers, magazines, advertisings… that outline the archetypes of the contemporary WOMAN and MAN conveyed by the mass media.

RE-PRISE
1977-1991   audio visual installation

RE-PRISE consists of the simultaneous projection of 8 series of commercial film frames found in a flea market in little match boxes:
1. Titles and credits   2. Female characters   3. Male characters   4. Action: hand gestures. 5. Relationship: the couple    6. Situation: by phone   7. The masses   8. The end
They reveal the different typologies, signs and icons of the cinematographic language. The sound is a collage of fragments of many soundtracks from all kinds of films.

SUPERMERCART
MACBA COLLECTION (having been part of the RAFAEL TOUS COLLECTION)
1976.
Installation. Various materials.
72 pieces of 270 x 30 cm.

The exhibition of objects or their images, their diversity and the way they are presented in a catalogue, has the character of a big department store or a supermarket.
The manipulation of the word SUPERMERCART comments on everything, even the air we breathe, regarded as a commodity.

MÖBIUS SPACES
1971
photography book, 50 pages (25 x 25 cm)

This accordion book has two simultaneous sequences, one inverted in respect to the other, occupying the upper and lower halves of the pages. Both sequences are of images of interior and exterior spaces that go from white to black. The book is a kind of circular experience of space with no beginning and no end.