Celebrity Biographies
Ouka leele
She was considered the great photographer of the Movida Madrileña. Ouka Leele has died this Tuesday at the Ruber hospital in Madrid at the age of 64, sources from the artist’s family have informed Efe, who have not wanted to specify her causes. She had presented her last exhibition a year earlier at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, within the PHotoEspaña festival. She had planned to give a photography workshop for children in the next edition of the Gijón Photographic Meetings, in November, at the Aurora Vigil-Escalera gallery in the Asturian city.
Born on June 29, 1957, in Madrid, Bárbara Allende Gil de Biedma – real name of Ouka Leele – was the niece of the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma. She studied Fine Arts, although she dropped out to start piano studies, while she went to the Photocentro in Madrid to learn photography.
After his first big exhibition, “Peluquería”, he adopted the name Ouka Lele, which comes from a star that appears in the comic Europa Requiem , by El Hortelano. But later he found out that with an extra ‘e’, his stage name meant ‘go around the world’ in the language of the Bubi of Equatorial Guinea, so he added the vowel, becoming Ouka Leele .
“We were children lost in Neverland, the odd ones in our families, and we understood each other,” recalled Ouka Leele from the Movida years. “One played, another painted, they prodded you to take photos… Very creative, we thought we important, that we were doing something historic. We weren’t in art to make money. The important thing was the freedom to do what we wanted.”
Pedro Almodóvar gave him a small role in Laberinto de pasiones , for which he also did some design. Besides, Ella ouka Leele participated as an actress in some shorts, and made a cameo in Tell me how it happened . She was in charge of the poster for the film Teresa, Teresa , by director Rafael Gordon , who later dedicated an emotional documentary to her, The Look of Ouka Leele. “Cinema is one of my passions professionally speaking and ever since my early youth I have been hovering around it,” he told Decine21. “The opportunity to take part in the filming of a feature film from within –and from within as well as being the protagonist– has been a precious step in my life. I have learned a lot. It was very beautiful and at the same time difficult because whoever put themselves in the hands of the The director was not the actress, but the person. I was amused to read in one of the first reviews after the premiere, that with this film the discovery of an actress was born”.
He also spoke in an interview with Decine21 about his favorite movies . He chose Bagdad Café , by Percy Adlon , “for several reasons. “The atmosphere that it recreates, the love… The boy who tirelessly plays Bach, even on a keyboard that is a wooden board with painted and soundproof keys. The soundtrack is also perfect. I love the characters and how happy everything that happens happens to me. How life can change when you have lost everything and you are alone with a suitcase in the middle of the desert where there is only a motel with some strange characters inhabiting it. A song to love, to the flow of life and how surprising and magical it can be”.
“Some films that I watch tirelessly and that have nothing to do with it are Un perro andaluz and Sonrisas y lágrimas . Regarding the first, he explains that “it’s like a continuum with infinite possibilities. I can see it over and over again and it is always new”. Something similar happens with the second, “but in a different way”, because he likes to “repeat and repeat scenes that I love and transport me to a place full of love”, although curiously when she saw it for the first time as a child, she did not like it at all.
Ouka Leele received the National Photography Award in 2005 “for questioning the limits of the language of photography,” according to the jury.