Public space

Haring’s mural in Barcelona was created in an almost fortuitous manner. On his way back from Madrid in 1989,, Haring met his friend Montse Guillén, a gastronome and restaurant owner living in New York. When Guillén suggested the possibility of making an intervention related to AIDS in Barcelona, Haring accepted on condition that he could choose the site, and selected a square in the Raval, then a seedy area known as the Barrio Chino.

As explained by its author, the photographer, historian and essayist Allan Sekula: ‘The starting point was a picture taken in the Sea of Marmara in Istanbul after Christmas 1999. A single worker, hunched like one of Bruegel’s peasants, retrieves debris with a shovel with the stranded ship behind him. A series of pictures based on this singular image came to me.’

Often working with images of the sea, Sekula uses here the image of a shipwreck as the starting point for the portrayal of jobs in danger of extinction throughout the world.

Barcelona has been a unique setting for the transformation of public space which is taking place throughout the Western World. The city's urban politics of the 1980s culminated in the changes propitiated by the 1992 Olympic Games and coined the phrase "Barcelona model." Since then, however, Barcelona has faced important changes in political values which have lead to the new metropolitan space.

In this publication David Harvey and Neil Smith outline the contradictory and ambivalent reality of global urbanism.

The photographs of Xavier Ribas analyse processes of transformation of contemporary metropolises, and the ways of life and habitability that these changes bring about.

“Thinking of the periphery made me reminisce on images of childhood, of when we played in the street. For example, my cousins lived in Carrer Entença and Carrer Casanoves, in the Eixample. They never played in the street. They’d go from school to after-school clubs, from the clubs to music lessons, and then home.”

Xavier Ribas

Permanently located on a podium outside the MACBA building, in the Plaça del Àngels, Barcelona, La ola by Jorge Oteiza has become an icon of Richard Meier’s building.

‘I try to occupy space with harmony’ says Oteiza, author of 'La ola' [The Wave],located on a podium outside the MACBA building, in the Plaça del Àngels, Barcelona.