Iran by Toni Serra or the edition of the unfinished legacy of a thinker

When he died in November six years ago, Toni Serra *) Abu Ali —as he signed his name to show that he belonged to two worlds: Catalan and Moroccan— was in the midst of one of the most ambitious projects of his career. He had won a Multiverso grant to travel to Iran and work on, broadly speaking, light and its importance in Iranian Sufism, of which he was very knowledgeable. He had already spent many hours recording sounds of the country's landscapes, but he was preparing another project when, during a technical stop in Barcelona, ​​he learned of the illness that would eventually claim his life at the age of 59. That material remained unfinished, although he had edited some fragments and also left behind draft scripts. Now, using these materials, video artist Alessandro Quaranta and musician Barbara Held have created a possible, yet equally provisional and revisable, interpretation entitled Journey to the light They present today, Saturday, to Abelló Museum from Mollet del Vallès.

"After the first trip, I spent two weeks working with him on the materials at his home near Marrakech," explains Barbara Held, a regular collaborator of Toni Serra, who, she says, always kept the sound and musical aspects of his visual essays very much in mind. Cuarenta, for his part, received a grant from the CRA'P and OVNI research residency program and has spent months immersed in Serra's films and his work to try to revive what might have been Serra's Iranian project. "As a video artist, I've learned a lot from his perspective, but I've tried to avoid any creative whims, striving to remain true to his spirit."

Toni Serra's work, in any case, is in the process of being recovered. One of his videos, 7 contemplations, it will be available to see in Rodoreda, a forestThe exhibition opens next week at the CCCB, and this week a tribute book was presented at La Central del Raval, capturing his legacy with a collective perspective.

The Visions of Abu Ali

The book is titled Open your vision, title of the writing The volume, published by the Cantabrian publishing house La Vorágine, concludes with a contribution by Toni Serra himself. It was coordinated and edited by Palmar Álvarez-Blanco and Gabriel Villota Toyos, both university professors who had collaborated with Serra and with theUFO observatory, an independent video distribution platform of which he was one of the founders.

"At first, what we wanted was to do an academic publication about his work," explained Villota, also the author of the special episode of the television program Metropolis, about Toni Serra From 2021. "We contacted a diverse group of people who had known him or worked with him. We asked them for articles, and in the end, due to the shock of his death and because the book's creation process has been lengthy, what remains is a multifaceted portrait, more emotional than academic, although some articles do offer insights into the future." The book, illustrated by Miguel Brieva, includes more than twenty contributors—such as Antoni Muntadas and Zoubida Bouzid—traces Serra's life and career, and also includes some of the most important writings of the thinker and video essayist. For Álvarez Blanco, the book "is a collective effort to preserve and share the legacy of an author who knew how to challenge the hegemonic narrative."