Claudio Zulian, “La montagna incantata”

He was born in Italy (Campodarsego, Padua) in 1965 and currently resides in Barcelona, Spain. He holds a PhD in Aesthetics, Science and Technology of the Arts from the University of Paris-Saint Denis (France). He is the author of a multifaceted body of work spanning the visual and sound arts, film, television, music, theatre and literature. A significant part of his work is characterised by a sensitivity to social and political issues and the search for specificity in each medium in which he works. He has taught courses, workshops and lectures at various universities and cultural and artistic centres and writes regularly for magazines and newspapers.

He has had solo exhibitions at centres and museums such as the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, Caixafòrum Barcelona and Jeu de Paume (Paris), among others.

His featured films and documentaries have been screened and won awards at international festivals in New York, Sydney, Singapore, Leipzig and Milan. He won the City of Barcelona Award and the National Award of Catalonia for A través del Carmel (2010), and his filmography includes works such as Sin Miedo (2017), No nacimos refugiados (2020), La montaña mágica (2023), and Constelación Portabella (2024), which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Sound installation

S’UBAC, 2000

Sound installation
Format: 28 audio channels.
Duration: Variable
Production: Acteon.
Sponsorship: XXI Festival Encontre Internacional de Compositors (Palma de Mallorca) and Fundació ACA
Voices (recorded): Antoni Caimari, Alexandre Ballester, Llorenç Mascaró, Maria Antònia and Margalida Vallespir, Francisca and Isabel Crespí, Antoni Vallès, Antònia Socias, Rafel Simó, Ferran Pizà and his son Jaume, Sebastià Campins, Iolanda Seguí, Antònia Bisquerra, Marta Alcolea, Francesc Cantallops
Collaboration: PHONOS Foundation Laboratory (IUA-UPF)

S’Ubac is the name of the forest where the traditional pilgrimage from Sa Pobla to the Crestatx chapel, a sacred space, takes place every year. Claudio Zulian knew Sa Pobla and many of its inhabitants well, as in the early 1990s he ran the ACA Foundation, located a few kilometres away. He saw the forest as a place capable of condensing the deep tension that runs through the village—like so many others today—where the mythical, the religious and the popular coexist seamlessly with television, social media, tourism, the industrialisation of the countryside and the general technification of life.

It is also worth highlighting the surprising vitality of popular peasant culture in the area, especially traditional singing, which is often of high quality in its interpretation. For almost a year, Zulian collected oral testimonies, recorded songs and soundscapes, and researched local archives and literary and academic texts until he defined a conceptual and formal core for the piece.

The piece seeks to create a Benjaminian dialectical image that reflects the tensions of a place considered a paradigm for many others: the clash between a past alive in the collective memory and a postmodernity that has arrived without having matured into full modernity. In a historically poor area, the harshness of work, its low pay and fear of the future—despite the relative well-being of the present—emerge as central themes. The songs that close each vocal section are work songs.

S’Ubac is structured around five groups of sound materials. The main ones are the voices of the inhabitants and the rhythms of the ximbomba, which accompany the popular songs. Their treatment responds to contemporary formal logics, based above all on serialisation and repetition.

The five themes are: the living memory of the past; the definition of Mallorcan identity; the social problems of the present; self-reflection; and, finally, a poetic operation: a woman, a man and a girl read the gravestones in the cemetery of Sa Pobla in the first person, as if they were messages left on an answering machine in a house today, whose characteristic sounds can also be heard. The past is always a feature of the present.

Audiovisuals

L’AVENIR, 2004

Film and video installation.
Format: 16:9
Duration: 23 min. B/W
Sponsorship: Culture Commune – Scène Nationale du Bassin minier du Pas-de-Calais, with Lille 2004 – European Capital of Culture, the European Community (European Social Fund), the Ministry of Culture (DRAC Nord-Pas de Calais), the Regional Council of Nord-Pas de Calais, the General Council of Pas-de-Calais and the Communauté d’agglomération de Lens/Liévin
Awards:
– Silver Dove Leipzig Documentary and Animated Film Festival 2005
– Ecumenical Award Leipzig Documentary and Animated Film Festival 2005
– Best Documentary Short Film Award Viña del Mar Digital Film Festival 2006
– Second Prize Best Documentary Mediterranean Film Festival, Siroki Brijeg, 2007
– Special Jury Mention International Film and Digital Arts Festival, Girona 2007

L’Avenir was filmed in the village of Meurchin (Lille), in north-western France. This region experienced a period of great economic prosperity due to the presence of coal mines, but from the 1960s onwards it suffered an inexorable industrial decline. In countless encounters with the residents—who were unfailingly kind—concern for the future—personal, for the village and for the region—emerged as the core around which many images and stories gravitated. The series of sequence shots that make up L’Avenir portrays some of the town’s inhabitants inside their homes, at work or at leisure, while their voices-over wonder about their own lives and their future.

A TRAVÉS DEL CARMEL, 2006

Video installation and feature-length documentary
Format: 16:9
Duration: 92 min.
Production: Acteon for Televisió de Catalunya
Collaboration: Institut Català d’Empreses Culturals de la Generalitat de Catalunya.
Awards:
– National Film Award from the Generalitat de Catalunya
– City of Barcelona Award from the Barcelona City Council

Claudio Zulian and his team worked for a year in Barcelona’s Carmel neighbourhood, a working-class neighbourhood perched on a hill in the city, built by immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s and with a long history of neighbourhood struggles – thanks to which it is now a dignified place. Nearly forty groups and fifteen individuals, totalling more than a hundred people, participated in the conception and filming of this 92-minute sequence shot. The result was an audiovisual record of almost two hours of neighbourhood life filmed without interruption throughout the day on 10 February 2006, from 4 to 6 p.m. The residents opened their homes, workshops and daily occupations to us and explained things about a typical day – where the origin and future of all life is summed up.

A LO MEJOR, 2007

Video installation and film
Format: 16:9
Duration: 13 min.
Production: Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló for the exhibition Nuestra hospitalidad (Our Hospitality), curated by Rodrigo Alonso.
Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Castellón (EACC)
Collaboration: Favius Buzatoaia, Maria Panait, Bebe Panait, Claudia Popescu, Mihai Gagiu, Corina Gheorghe. Spanish voiceovers: Lia Opris, Ion Adrian Alani.
Awards:
– Best Creative Documentary at Canarias Mediafest 2008

Claudio Zulian worked for several months with a group of Romanian immigrants in Castelló de la Plana. However, instead of portraying the city from the immigrants’ perspective, the artist chose to capture the fantasies of their families and friends, who had remained in Romania and therefore only knew Castelló from the stories and images sent from Spain. In the testimonies of these family members and friends, the city takes on a fantastical appearance; human and working relationships, on the other hand, are very concrete.

The original voices in Romanian have been dubbed by a Romanian woman and man who have been living in Spain for some time. The accent is the journey of language.

LA MONTAGNA INCANTATA, 2023

Feature-length documentary and expanded cinema
Format: 16:9, B/W
Duration: 102 min
Production: Acteon
Co-production: Jolefilm (Italy)
Awards:
-Director’s Award ‘Testimony of our time’ at the Campodarsego Culture Gala 2023

In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, patients and medical staff live together in a luxury sanatorium, isolated from the world. The book, in fact, builds a metaphor for a sick era. Inspired by reading it, I revisited some images I recorded during the pandemic and lockdown of 2020. A few years have passed since then, and now, empty cities and people isolated in their homes can be seen, in the manner of Thomas Mann, as an X-ray of our current daily life – with its secret scaffolding and intangible illnesses. The Magic Mountain is an ensemble film in which twenty people from a corner of Veneto – once a poor agricultural land, now a rich industrial region – in north-eastern Italy explore their own lives and surroundings in those strange times. Suspended in emptiness and silence, poor, rich, natives and immigrants, women, men, children and the elderly question themselves about the hopes and difficulties of our existence.

Parallel activity: Documentary and talk between Jordi Ballò and Claudio Zulian.

• When: March 2026 
• Where: Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca – Auditorium

Duration: 88’
Version: Original version with subtitles
Production: Acteon
Co-production: 3Cat, RTVE, La Charito Films, Eddie Saeta, Caixaforum +
Collaborators: Catalan Institute of Cultural Industries (ICIC) of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Films 59, Mercury Films, ICAA, Institut Ramón Llull, Xarxa Audiovisual Local, Antaviana.
Award:
-Audience Award at the Memorimage Festival in Reus, 2025
Festivals:
-Venice Film Festival – Competition 2024
-Valladolid Film Festival – Seminci 2024
-Buenos Aires International Film Festival – BAFICI 2025
-Festival D’A, Barcelona 2025
-Sao Paulo Film Festival 2025

This is the first documentary dedicated to the life and work of Pere Portabella (Barcelona, 1927), made by Claudio Zulian (A través del Carmel, Born) using excerpts from films, talks, lectures and interviews with Portabella himself in different media throughout his career as a filmmaker and politician. Framing it all are reflections from critics, film directors and historians who have been involved with his art and participated in his works. Thanks to Jordi Ballò, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Luis E. Parés, among others, we immerse ourselves in the challenges behind the creative endeavours of a total artist.

PERE PORTABELLA. A great Spanish filmmaker: his films No compteu amb els dits, Nocturno 29, Vampir–cuadecuc, Umbracle, Pont de Varsòvia and El silencio antes de Bach have been fundamental references in an influential and alternative film culture. Portabella has also been a very important producer: we owe him Marco Ferreri’s El cochecito and Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana. He has also been a very prominent politician: he was elected senator of the Spanish Constituent Assembly and his signature is on the Spanish Constitution of 1978.