Enderroc, 1996/2020

Within the context of the 1996 exhibition, the artist said: ‘…the work represents a series of walls that correspond to a five-storey house like the ones in the neighbourhood, around the Museum. More than a simulation, there is the suggestion of private dwellings within the Museum, which is a space on a different scale. The work also evokes the idea of private and public, the anonymity of the walls against the known, the people who come into the Museum.’ Aballí built five large chromatic areas on the back wall of the atrium, a wall that extends the full height of the Meier building and which is continually visible from the ramp linking the various levels of the Museum. Made with paint and wallpaper, of different colours and textures, as the title suggests Enderroc evokes the traces of domestic interiors such as might be left exposed during the demolition of a neighbouring building. In a very direct and physical way, such buildings preserve, as a living testimony, the memory of their interiors. ‘It's interesting to be able to access the different levels of the building through the different levels of the Museum’, Aballí explains.

After twenty-five years, MACBA has become an icon inseparable from the neighbourhood that hosts it, the Raval. Its construction, in the Olympic Barcelona of the early nineties, helped to profoundly transform the area and project it into the future, while preserving its identity. Then, as today, the Museum has sought to grow in dialogue with its physical and human environment. Thus, being attentive to the remains and the memory of a place, works such as Enderroc are as current and valid today as they were a few years ago; and recovering Aballí’s installation is based on this same conviction. Even back then, the curator of the exhibition wrote in the catalogue: ‘The artist's gaze, the gaze from the inside out and from the outside in, the introspection inside the building and within the concept of the Museum, the gaze toward the history of the Raval district, the events that affect its people, the urban fabric. [...] The multiplicity of visions generated by the artists help us to understand the importance of the existence of MACBA in the Raval.’