The film about the architect Enric Miralles was born from a fortunate encounter with the character, like when, as Enric himself used to say: You put your hand in the pocket of a second-hand jacket and find something you weren’t expecting.”
The encounter was marked by the same amazement, not so much by the myth surrounding his figure, but by the mysterious side of his creative process, by the fierce love for life and the curse of losing it prematurely. Enric Miralles is, above all, a unique and unexpected architect in the contemporary scene, but I immediately felt that through his story and work, I could try to touch on a deep aspect of the human condition: our inevitable fragility and the unstoppable need to find a path, to look at the unanswered question that underlies our existence.
Miralles wrote a text titled Portrait of Giacometti, in which he reflected on the creative process of the famous Swiss sculptor and painter. Miralles worked in variations on the same theme, like Giacometti, in an incessant search for possibilities to portray reality that incorporates the passage of time into architecture, unafraid that it may turn into ruins or a forest, in which the ground of a country dances, a revolutionary Parliament, or the tomb of the architect himself. Miralles’ architecture is an architecture full of humanity, and that makes it the ideal landscape for a film. We are faced with an artist who has a powerful vision of the world and is close to our existential condition. That is why this film is necessary, as it allows us to turn architecture, the space in which all our existence moves, into a space for reflection on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, appearance and disappearance, death and life.