IN-PERSON Barcelona Livable Cities. Section A

Abstract

From 1992 to 1993, I studied Winchester School of Art’s MA European Fine Art and lived and worked in Barcelona as part of a 9-month studio residency, situated between studios in Barra de Ferro and Poble Nou. In the wake of a post-Olympiad influx of funding the city had been transformed with many of its historic and unreconstructed barrios regenerated, as the city was rebranded as a revitalised tourist and cultural capital. My sojourn marked an intersection in my practice and development as an artist, which was materialised and manifest in a succession of chance meetings and encounters with artists and individuals, sensory impressions and things purloined, and picked up on the streets of the city, and at its outskirts, and transformed into artworks. I later revisited the city a couple of years later near the same time that Rem Koolhaas addressed the Olympic legacy in The Generic City (1995) This paper revisits the city via a collection of fragments and impressions in print, rendered in photographs, as well as imprinted on the mind, which subsequently led to strategies of experience and encounter as part an ongoing project titled Sites of the Habitus and the Filmic. A set of analytical reflections and fragments takes its cue from Michel de Certeau’s essay ‘Walking the City’ in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985), Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Trace of the Other’ (1963), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Alan Robbe-Grillet’s Topology of a Phantom City (1976).