Homo Urbanus

For fifteen years now, Bêka & Lemoine have been investigating how people relate to space: how they inhabit it, how they appropriate it, and how they shape it. Their extensive, and still ongoing, film project ‘Homo Urbanus’ depicts the peculiar species of the urban dweller by exploring the daily life of ten world cities.

Shot with sensorial vitality and unusual proximity, these films question how the built environment affects human behavior by framing, ordering, and directing the way we collectively make use of space in the city. Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine devote particular attention to moments of vulnerability, exposing fragilities and tensions, as well as our remarkable ability to adapt to an environment in which power, efficiency, and competitiveness are increasingly dominant values.
At the S AM, ‘Homo Urbanus’ unfolds as a dérive through different space-time sequences at the rhythm of a continuously rearranging urban symphony. Following the same notion of spontaneous encounters that guided the making of these films, the exhibition is an invitation to experience the city as an unpredictable organism in perpetual movement and metamorphosis.