IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

When I hear the word “culture” I release the safety-catch of my Browning. From the Hanns Johst 1933 play Schlageter. When I hear the word “culture”, I bring out my checkbook; Jack Palance in the Jean-Luc Godard 1963 film Contempt; The word “culture” should be put in quarantine, given some rest, left to recover its original meaning and depth Lina Bo Bardi on her project SESC Pompéia in Sao Paulo, 1977-1986. A lesser known success of post-Franco Barcelona is the municipal transformation of old industrial buildings into spaces for cultural and artistic activity. In 2007 the Barcelona City Council introduced a framework to support the many locally-driven artist initiatives. Today, the Fabriques de Creacio is a network of 11 centers across the city. Each functions with a high degree of independence; almost all the Art Factories are run by an external entity related to a specific artistic field. This paper places this remarkable yet low-key and locally-driven program into both local and global contexts: the public vocation of Catalan folk culture and popular arts; the ‘culture wars’ of Anglo neoliberalism with comparable projects from Atlanta post-Olympics; and the phenomenal civic, social, and architectural success of Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia, part of the non-governmental social services initiative SESC (El Servicio Social do Comércio) in Brazil. In contrast to the more widely known promotion of Barcelona’s cultural capital on the world stage since the 1990s by its economic, political, and cultural elites, the Fabriques de Creacio initiative, treats the “city and its cultural life as living questions” for its inhabitants rather than as commodities for consumption by tourists and global media. Each fabrique responds to the needs and desires of the groups drawn to its focus. They exemplify what Lina Bo Bardi discovered at and set as her goal for the transformation of Pompéia: “What we want is precisely to maintain and amplify what we’ve found here, nothing more”