On Wednesday 5 June at 7pm Laia Abril, Spanish photographer and artist, and Bill Morrison, American director, will be at Fabrica for an event open to the public in which they will present their work and latest projects. Bill and Laia both began their professional careers at Fabrica in 1995 and 2009 respectively.
The evening starts at 7:00pm with the lecture of Laia Abril, a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores and develops themes related to femininity and biopolitics, moving naturally through different media such as photography, text, video and sound.
The event continues with the screening of “Incident” (30′, 2023), a short film by Bill Morrison. The director uses police body-worn and other surveillance camera footage to reconstruct the 2018 Chicago police shooting of Harith Augustus, a 37 year old barber who was needlessly stopped for carrying a gun he was licensed to own, and was senselessly killed in the melée that followed. The film approaches the build-up to the incident, the shooting, and its immediate aftermath, through a variety of split screen quadrants that present a continuous, simultaneous, synchronized view of the event in 30 minutes of real time.
Laia Abril (1986) is a research-based artist renowned for her work with photography, text, video, and sound, focusing on biopolitics and gender equality. After earning a degree in Journalism in Barcelona and studying photography in New York, she spent five years as a researcher, editor, and staff photographer at Colors Magazine. Her installations have been exhibited in over 20 countries and are part of collections in prestigious institutions such as the Centre Pompidou and FRAC in France, Musée de l’Elysée and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, MoCP in Chicago, Museum of Sex in New York, and MNAC and FotoColectania in Barcelona. Abril is the author of several influential books, including “On Abortion” (Dewi Lewis, 2018), which won the Aperture Best Book Award and was a finalist for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Prize. Her projects have received support from the Magnum Foundation (2018), and she has been honored with the Visionary Award (2019), the RPS Hood Medal (2019), the Foam Paul Huf Award (2022), and the Spanish National Award (2023). She is a senior lecturer at Camera Arts (HSLU, Luzern) and is represented internationally by the Parisian gallery Les Filles du Calvaire.
Bill Morrison, born in Chicago in 1965, has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride and Venice film festivals.
Morrison has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Alpert Award, and the
Foundation for Contemporary Arts, as well as production grants from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts and Arté – La Lucarne. He had a mid-career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 2014. His found footage opus Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be named to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. The Great Flood (2013) was recognized with the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for historical scholarship. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) was included on over 100 critics’ lists of the best films of the year and was later listed as one of the best films of the decade by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair, among others. In 2021 Morrison became a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The Village Detective: a song cycle (2021) had its North American premiere at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival and was released by Kino Lorber theatrically and on home video in North America.
His most recent film, Incident (2023), about a Chicago police shooting that took place in 2018, premiered at the 2023 Visions du Réel film festival, and won the International Documentary Association’s Best Short Documentary Film Award of 2023.
Laia Abril and Bill Morrison are two of the mentors of the “Kinship” residency program curated by Carlos Casas. Laia and Bill also held two workshops for young Fabrica residents.
