September 2021
Ruta de autor 1/5
by Ruta de autor

Let’s call it quick overview

It all began on board a train.

Looking back, in an arbitrary exercise of memory, Ruta de autor was born out of our desire to walk, to inhabit cities from different disciplines (art, literature, psychogeography…). Every time we moved, we needed to take over the space, to make our own footnotes. Bouncing off tourist brochures and official histories, which generalise and multiply clichés, we decided to create our own itineraries. Initially, the format that most appealed to us was a notebook. Publications have always interested us as a way of formalising experiences. But, due to lack of resources, we put the idea aside. Some time later we realised that we could start with the walks and then deal with the publication, and that’s how walking became the starting point.

We left the written word to rescue orality and the steps. We started to develop several routes and to collaborate with different institutions. The first route was a journey through the south of Venezuela, specifically in Canaima.

Foto: Aymara Arreaza R.

We set out to trace the journeys of the Catalans who made expeditions in that area; their relations with that territory, their greed for gold, their crossings of rivers and mountains, their comings and goings. A year later, we continued to delve into Barcelona’s relationship with the Americas. and we then delved into the investments and capital transfers of those who made their fortune in places such as Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Mexico… and who, after thirty years, returned to the Peninsula and settled in the Catalan capital, where their investments contributed to the growth of the city.

In this route of the Indianos que venimos haciendo desde el año 2014, caminamos desde Pla de Palau [https://goo.gl/maps/LRF5ZQB8HgjYoFu16] to the Ramblas, a critical exercise that questions monuments and elements of the urban landscape. In the more than eighty outings that we have activated with this itinerary, the awakening of certain amnesias with respect to colonial histories stands out. We have embodied other ways of approaching the city and have created new narratives that have allowed us to articulate other perspectives, a way of generating displacements and creating hybrid spaces of resistance.

Foto: Dani Cantó.

On the other hand, we have also developed routes along the waterfront, on the slopes of the Llobregat River, the Poblenou superilla, the Carmelo…

Foto: Ramon Ruaix Prat.

We are currently working on a proposal that links up with an event that we have always wanted to tackle. It is the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona in 1888. We are dealing with some of the leisure activities promoted at this event. With this proposal we seek to dismantle the false belief that the universalist vision from on high allows us to reach the totality, to close the circle.

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Text by Ruta de autor for GRAF. Ruta de autor are Aymara Arreaza R. and Lorena Bou Linhares.

This route is part of a series of five a series of five in which four other artists participate and that will be published in the coming months. Ruta de autor has selected four works that address the peripheries of Barcelona: Internet infrastructures (Mario Santamaría), the colonial garden (Agustín Ortiz Herrera), artistic gentrification (Zaida Trallero) and the homeless present (Leonor Urdaneta). We invite you to read, walk and stay tuned.