IBIZA BODIES: SUMMER FILMS OF NICOLA L.

This film programme brings together three films made by visual artist Nicola L. during and around her time in Ibiza in the 1960s and 1970s — a period shaped by experimentation, artistic exchange, and collective living. Immersed in the island’s community of artists and local inhabitants, Nicola L. approached Ibiza as a living landscape defined by movement, mythology, and shared experience. In films such as Here She Is and Les Têtes d’Ibiza, fiction, performance, and documentary observation merge fluidly, transforming the island into a site of freedom, imagination, and communal expression.

The programme runs in parallel with the exhibition Nicola L.: When the Earth Turned the Other Way (25 June–11 October 2026) at M HKA, which situates her work within a broader constellation of performance, feminist experimentation, and collaborative image-making. Born in Morocco and active across Paris, Brussels, New York, and Ibiza, Nicola L. developed a transnational and community-oriented artistic practice that occupied a singular place within the postwar avant-garde. From the late 1960s onward, she created a highly distinctive body of work encompassing soft sculptures, immersive environments, and participatory performances in which touch, use, and collective experience became central artistic principles.

The films will be introduced by curator Joanna Zielińska and presented on the big screen to reactivate their collective and spatial dimensions — works originally conceived between cinema, performance, and exhibition space, where bodies, gestures, and environments remain inseparable.

At the screening, we will also serve an Ibiza-inspired cocktail or mocktail, included free with your film ticket.

More info on the films:

• Here She Is (ca. 1976, 15 min.)
  After her solo exhibition at ICC Antwerp and the group exhibition Je/Nous in Brussels in 1975, Nicola L. returned to Ibiza, where she lived for several years within a dense network of artists, collaborators, and local communities. On the island, she continued developing her Penetrables and expanded her practice into film. In 1976 she shot the Super 8 film Here She Is, which she describes in her memoir as “a portrait of an extravagant American woman.” The work extends her sculptural and performative approach into cinema, treating character, gesture, and environment as interwoven elements rather than separate registers.
• Les Têtes d’Ibiza (ca. 1976, 38 min.)
  After returning to Ibiza in 1976, Nicola L. became intrigued by two headless statues marking the entrance to the old town. Initially assuming they had been damaged by time or invasion, she later climbed a ladder to inspect them closely: “I realize that there is no break but that the cut at the bottom of the neck is very smooth… and lets glimpse inside a hole that seems to wait for the impale of a head.”
  From this observation, she developed a fictional investigation into the missing heads. A friend’s hypothesis suggested that, given Ibiza’s history of successive rulers, the heads may have been detachable and interchangeable. This idea opens into a broader narrative structure in which speculation, oral history, and imagination overlap.
  As Nicola L. writes in her memoir, “It seems that they were gold and are buried somewhere on the island.” She constructs a series of imagined interviews with island inhabitants—Ibicencos, hippies, artists—using the mystery as a way to map the social and cultural landscape of Ibiza in the 1970s, before mass tourism fully transformed it.
• Penetrables – Red Coat Beach Performance (1975, 11 min.)
  Filmed on an Ibiza beach in 1975, this performance brings together Nicola L.’s Penetrables and her iconic Red Coat within a direct engagement with landscape. The work unfolds as an open interaction between body, object, and environment, where participation and movement replace fixed composition.