Family War is a video piece from 2007 that Noguera made with an archive of images from the first half of the 20th century found in the Empordà. The artist puts in dialogue recordings of the Second World War made by a Dutch reporter with domestic footage of the same person in his family environment. The atmosphere and the domestic and intimate imaginary of this anonymous Dutch family coexists with the destabilizing event of war, linking both spaces like a metaphorical labyrinth of images.

Almost bucolic family scenes collected in amateur films are contrasted with documentary war scenes. The filmic recycling of these “found” materials allows the creation of a visual diptych that expresses the contradictions, instability and intrinsic weaknesses on which well-being and possible moments of happiness are based. In this way, the recovered film archives are ordered as a way of thinking and reading the reality of an era, the ways of living and of relating to a concrete reality, but at the same time representing a shared social memory. Noguera’s method involves a questioning of the relationship between the spatial dimension of everyday life and also the construction of both identity and memory, in the manner of a living archaeology of a past that still feels recent or near. In this new screening of Family War, the impact and vision of the past is transferred and revived in dialogue with our present, both intimate and global, passing through a whole repertoire of vital situations.

Family War talks about how a family, and with great emphasis on the children, live the family atmosphere and their holidays in parallel to the distortion of a war, two realities that coexist, sometimes, in the distance of space and time, as is also the case in our present. A possible reconstruction of a memory that contrasts the family experience and the facts of the world, the private with the public, a poetic and political reflection that is more than pertinent.

Through the archive, and in this case the film archive as a trace of a reality and a simulacrum, Noguera lets us glimpse and reveals the secrets and processes of manipulation and construction of the image. The construction of images, their historical character and the stories they contain make Pere Noguera a sui generis archivist, grouping images and archives to extract new visions. As Noguera himself says, “My work consists of taking and bringing to light a whole series of stories that are already in reality, knowing how to show them. It’s as if I were helping them to describe themselves”, as if his working method was more like deconstructing the archive. The archive as a synthesis and repose of a past time becomes present through the call to the internal temporality of the images.

Pere Noguera (La Bisbal de Empordà, Girona, 1941) began his career within the framework of the new poor, ephemeral and conceptual poetics of the 1970s and was a pioneer in incorporating photocopies into his work and disseminating the idea of the archive as a ready-made based on found photographs and films. He has worked on the conceptual processes of photography and electrography, and has practiced installation and performance. Matter as process, domestic object and immediate landscape form part of his centers of interest.

His work is part of important public and private collections such as Artium (Vitòria-Gasteiz), MACBA (Barcelona), Olor Visual Collection (Barcelona), Vila Casas Foundation (Barcelona), Juan March Foundation (Madrid), Suñol Foundation (Barcelona), National Art Collection of Catalonia (Barcelona), among others.