Beat Streuli: the dignity of the crowd Have a happy week of La Mercè!

In the autumn of 1997, Beat Streuli spent a few days in Barcelona taking photographs of the anonymous passers-by who stroll along the streets and squares around the MACBA building every day. The result of the experiment is Plaça dels Àngels, a sequence of twenty-eight photographs constructed like a membrane or a symbolic screen to link the interior and exterior spaces of the museum, placed on the glass walls of the reception area inside the building. True to the conceptual ideas that have defined his international artistic career, Streuli has produced a new collective portrait in which, through the photographic image, he dignifies the everyday and at the same time stresses the social nature of the architecture. This artistic contribution bears documentary witness to a particular place and time, as well as some fiction from an artist who is interested in representing a way of living and communicating with ordinary people with his camera.