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December 2021
Ruta de autor 4/5
by Zaida Trallero

From Soho to fresquet d’en Toni

This route could start in another place and another time. At a party. At the 80 Wooster Street building in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood on 29 June 1971. Jonas Mekas was filming the event. The guests were artists and participated in the dumpling party organised by George Maciunas. Most of those present had settled in the area during the 1960s, coming from all over and looking for a place to live and work. SoHo offered them the possibility of living cheaply and working in large spaces. In this way, they began to occupy the buildings that had been emptied of industrial machinery due to the deindustrialisation of the city. Decades earlier, the district had been home to a large number of workshops and warehouses that gradually disappeared, leaving only a few printing presses that stubbornly remained.

The first artists to move in spruced up the place, and the neighbourhood regained its former vibrancy. Shared spaces for living and working were soon created. One of the most active artists was Maciunas with his Fluxhouse project, which transformed SoHo and devised the cooperative residencies. He was also instrumental in the city planning commission’s decision to designate part of the neighbourhood as an artists’ residency area. This “loft life”1 in which a succession of exhibitions, parties, performances… became desirable not only for artists, but also for gallerists, collectors, etc., who saw it as a “fun” way to break with the conventions of the time. In a short time it became the area with the most galleries in the city, accommodating rents and services to the new settlers and, therefore, displacing artists to other cheaper neighbourhoods further away from the centre.

1 Sharon Zunkin quoted by Martha Rosler in Clase cultural. Arte y gentrificación, Buenos Aires, Caja Negra Editora, 2010.

Performance by Trisha Brown, resident of the 80 Wooster building, where she made her first works, such as Man Walking Down the Side of a Building.

We jumped the pond. We are in Poblenou. A post-industrial neighbourhood in Barcelona with a route somewhat similar to SoHo. In the 80s and 90s artists arrived, formed associations and lived together in workshops and housing located in the spaces abandoned by industry in the 70s. La Escocesa, a former textile factory and current centre of production and thinking, is an example of this, following a community and assembly model, a legacy of the first artists who settled there. But Poblenou has been reconverted into a neighbourhood @, whose transformation has led to the destruction of the economic and social fabric. There is no longer any space for artists who want to establish their place of work. They can, of course, do residencies or study in the neighbourhood, but not work. And work is what most of the artists who, for example, finish their production grant at Hangar, a centre for production and research in the Visual Arts, are looking for. Although many, after the Hangar experience, feel the need to continue with the same collective dynamic in a shared workspace, for others the reason is purely economic.

View from La Escocesa, Poblenou.

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Eight stops and ten minutes is how long it takes to get from the centre to the suburbs by metro. I have arrived at Santa Eulàlia, the “friendly” neighbourhood of L’Hospitalet. The closest to Barcelona, next to Collblanc. For some years now this route has been frequented by artists who have set up their workspace or their homes in this area or others nearby. Some of them arrived after their time at Hangar, displaced from the Barcelona that doesn’t offer affordable, spacious, bright spaces… and found, in this southern part of the municipality, an archaeology of the industrial era that is easy to reconvert with their own resources. The artistic community is growing in L’H; artists by word of mouth, gallery owners, designers… Each new arrival is haunted by the spectre of gentrification. Because it is known that the artist is a “passive” agent in the revitalisation processes of a neighbourhood, as his/her lifestyle can attract a wealthier “creative” class, and property developers commodify his/her presence.

Edifici Freixas photo by Nevenka Pavic

If we approach the Edifici Freixas, a place where small industry and artists’ studios that arrived many years ago coexist, we will see that the nearby housing development uses the name Arts as a lure. But, for now, the coloniser of the neighbourhood is middle class who have suffered from the touristification of Barcelona and are attracted to L’H by the new “luxury” and “economic” (in comparison) constructions rather than by the artistic context. An artistic context in which the shared workshops are cultural associations (in many cases) that, through self-management, organise exhibitions and alternative activities that generate new itineraries in the face of the institutional and commercial offer provided by the neighbouring city. Some examples: FASE with activities such as Glutamato Session, Encounters in the third phase… Dracul-la with exhibitions such as PASTICHE; trama34 with Meta Monumental Market, A.F.FAIR and Solitaria; La Infinita, with festive proposals and performances; ARXIU/AM and galleries with riskier programming draw an attractive panorama for a Cultural District that was born as an urban plan for L’Hospitalet, in a specific area, and that is still redefining itself today.

Meanwhile, on the way to TPK, founded by self-taught artists in the 1980s, I stop for a few beers at El Fresquet d’en Toni, where that good tradition of the first waves of migrants who arrived in the city in the 1950s lives on: with a beer you get a delicious and plentiful tapa.

View taken from the artist Carles Gabarró’s studio of the initial perimeter of the Cultural District of La H.

View of the Meta Monumental Market, event organised by Trama34, L’Hospitalet.

Del Soho al fresquet d’en Toni collects notes from previous research Artistas y Districte Cultural. Posibilidades, implicaciones y compromisos versus la gentrificación. Caso de estudio L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (Artists and Cultural District. Possibilities, implications and commitments versus gentrification. Case study L’Hospitalet de Llobregat) with a grant from the Museum of History of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat in 2020.

Ruta Graf with Ruta de autor. Text by Zaida Trallero, who works in the field of curatorship and management.

This route is part of a series of five in which four other artists participate. 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.