Loading...

Sin título (Pícnic solar industrial). Serie: "Domingos", 1994-1997

Untitled (Picnic on Industrial Land). Series: "Sundays", 1994-1997
Photograph, 120 x 140 cm

Xavier Ribas (Barcelona, 1960), a Catalan photographer who is interested in urban anthropology and notions of public space and everyday life, has specialised in photographs that trace the habits of ordinary people living in today's cities. In Barcelona he has worked on several projects that explore the idea of the periphery.

The MACBA Collection has recently acquired several photographic series on Barcelona by Ribas, including Habitus, a series of 67 photographs taken in 2007 in six of the city's outlying areas: La Mina, Bellvitge, Can Serra, Ciutat Satèl·lit, Ciutat Meridiana and Badia del Vallès. Displayed in a kaleidoscopic installation, most of the photographs show the housing developments that were put up in the sixties and seventies to house the State's migrant labour force. As in other European cities, the specific types of buildings that were built, the lack of public spaces and services, and the non-existent urban planning defined the early years of these areas, which ended up becoming stigmatised. Gradually, the local communities have managed to make their demands for urban renewal heard by the relevant administrations.

Ribas borrowed the title, Habitus, from one of the key concepts developed by French sociologist Pierre Bordieu to describe the ways of thinking, living and feeling that are shaped through human socialisation. Although there is a sense of a lack human presence in the photographs by Ribas, and the few people that appear in them suggest a certain isolation, the project as a whole emphasises the appropriation of these neighbourhoods by the people who live in them. The underlying idea is that the real life of contemporary cities is no longer in the historic city centres, which have become theme parks for global tourism, but rather in the outskirts.

A further project, Domingos (1994-1998), is one of Ribas's best known series. It examines family leisure time in Barcelona's urban wastelands: picnics, games, relaxation, strolling, siestas and family gatherings in housing estates and sites that are yet to be developed. All of the images focus on spaces that have not been codified by urban logic, and have become enclaves of social creativity.


Technical details

Original title:
Sin título (Pícnic solar industrial). Serie: "Domingos"
Registration number:
3190
Artist:
Ribas, Xavier
Date created:
1994-1997
Date acquired:
2008
Fonds:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium
Object type:
Photograph
Media:
C-Print
Dimensions:
120 x 140 cm (height x width)
Edition number:
Ed. 4/6
Credits:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium
Copyright:
© Xavier Ribas, VEGAP, Barcelona
It has accessibility resources:
No

The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.

For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.

If you need a high resolution image of the work, you must submit an image loan request.