To mark the ocassion of the exhibition L’altre costat (The Other Side) at the Santa Monica Arts Centre the artist Francesca Llopis offers us a tour of the other side of gentrified Barcelona: a pre-Olympic city, rogue, underground city. A city that had not yet experienced the burden of being the capital of design, sports, cruise ship tourism.
With this stroll around the Ciutat Vella district of 70’s and 80’s Barcelona, Francesca invites us to imagine what these places might have been like in the height of a historical moment of pure creative and social potential, the best part of which are unrecognisable today. The Barcelona on this tour is the other side of the Barcelona-brand we are living in now.
It’s not intended as an exercise of futile nostalgia, but rather of using the political association belonging to certain pasts to reinterpret the present. Going on this journey through time allows us to review the official and manipulated narrative of the Transition and Barcelona’s underground culture and the common ground that connects them, from a critical perspective.
We will also glimpse certain inertias and resistances in the artistic practices of a generation that began to awaken on the other side of the dream of reason imposed by Francoism. We invite you to replicate the both everyday and extraordinary experience of a generation that could begin to see the light at the end of a very long tunnel, and to imagine the other side of the Barcelona you now see. You might even discover the remains that still survive.
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The house I live in
Tour of The Other Side
When I used to visit my grandparents on Comerç Street I would enter into the hustle and bustle of the Mercat del Born covered market, where the colours and the smells contrasted completely with the dark and fearful city of the late 60’s. The chaos was similar to when, later on, we rescued it from imminent demolishment in the early 80’s. Artists and poets organised concerts and protests, it was a ghostly, abandoned space and we gave it new life.
We dreamt of freedom, anarchy was in bloom all around, the dictatorship had fallen and we were celebrating on the streets with our painting, writing and performance. Innocent, we could finally see this other world through a peephole! We were the city’s underground, our nights would en up at Zeleste, the best bar in history designed by Silvia Gubern and Angel Jové – she designed the sleeve for the LP Qualsevol nit pot sortir el sol (Any Night the Sun May Come Out).
From 1977 to 1982 I lived on Trafalgar Street, Princesa Street (in the house where the painter Rossinyol was born) and on Milans Street. At this time I became a regular at Kentucky bar, in those days frequented only by sailors, truckers and old men who sat bored along the corridor bar stools, where the walls were covered with tickets and pictures of ships that transported us to foreign lands, all doused in absinthe and music from beyond that made us dream.
The house I live in now, since 1983, was really on the other side, it was Apache territory. Passeig de Sant Joan was a district outside the city walls full of textile warehouses that became Chinese stores in the 90’s. Next to l’estació del Nord bus station there were tranny hostals and bars with clients coming and going both day and night, becoming the blade-runners in my paintings. I remember one of them with her exuberant, white fur coat, skirting around half-naked to go shopping at the Santa Catarina market like a ghost back from the beyond, after a night of sex and drugs, looking really out-of-place among the housewives going shopping for their families and who did not even bat an eyelid at her.
Back then the Arc de Triomf was a somewhat sad monument, with its neglected and misunderstood modernist architecture, and cars circling round it. On one of my birthdays someone set a car on fire there and we interpreted it as a gift from the city. Between the Encants flea market and the sea we could see factories with a new function – they sheltered displaced people that lived among the bushes and constructions made from recycled materials, wooden numbers, sign lettering, it was a world we transited through with great curiosity and suspicion that served as inspiration to us….
At the Metrònom gallery in 1985 I showed Barcelona trasbalsada (Barcelona Overturned). It was a series of monumental paintings in which the subject were visions of the city form the sea to Montserrat, from South to North, populated by Gods that came from the beyond and inhabited the port mimicking the cranes. It was a contemporary art and music space showing work by national and international artists, a turning point of reference for the cultural transformation of the city.
On Montcada Street was the French gallery Maeght (now MOCO) where we exhibited alongside Xabela Vargas, Llimòs, Mirò, etc. The openings were a special act. They had an amazing vitality and buzz that transported us to another reality, as if we were in Paris or New York, or at least that’s what it felt like for us.
One day Marta Taché, cultural dreamer and accomplice of artists, invited me to paint in the middle of the new Passeig Picasso avenue, where there was a sculpture by Tapies. It was a somewhat surrealist situation, as a mare stood beside me eating the straw from a bail of hay I was sitting on to draw. Once we’d got over our fear, after a while we began to exchange certain gazes, keeping our calm, as if everything that was happening was completely normal.
When we walked through the night to visit bars such as Sukursal, Cangrejo, Este bar or the Metropol we would dress up in clothes we’d fashioned at home. Design was present in everything everywhere.
Sexual liberation was another paradigm shift, women could finally decide how and what we wanted from our bodies. On Carrer Bruc with Ronda de Sant Pere there was a feminist centre, where they gave you the best advice in the unfortunate situation you had to have an abortion, as the law took a long time to come into effect.
Les Rambles were ours, up and down, reciting life, exhibiting ourselves and demonstrating at all hours. The Teatre Principal was home to the Cúpula Venus with la orquesta de Señoritas (The Ladies’ Orchestra) conducted by Paulovsky and the Monforte Billiard Club that competed against the billiards at the Coliseu cinema on Gran Via, a smoke-filled atmosphere embossing peoples’ shadows, where all that was missing was for Humprey Bogart to appear backlit in the doorway of the premises.
We sheltered in the Raval bakeries, what is now the Makinavaja bar, to have hot coffee, buns and sandwiches so we could keep going and never stop. Les Rambles took us to another world, American sailors with their hats, that Artaud would have loved, the descent of local character La Monyos in front of a Liceu with no barriers, the Cow-boy, the Aunty who played a little battery powered organ. Gentlemen sat on chairs, the cleaners and the birds opened up the shops early.
The Avenue of Light was under Pelai street, crowded with little shops and bars and vagabonds, where there used to be a little cinema called El Palacio de la Risa (The Palace of Laughter). I can’t remember the films we saw there, but I am sure they were a journey to the other side of the night. Everything was open all the time! By day we painted, published, worked. By night we danced, conspired, did drugs, made love… it was non-stop.
The Barceloneta district was full of beach shacks and pools, the favourite in my entourage was the Salmonete restaurant with Carmen as its hostess. She cooked the best paellas, gave us the best liquors while Bernardo recited poetry. From there, we watched the sea and the people that swarmed the beach; the hours went by and new situations arose. Considering the many shortages, we embarked upon projects thinking we would change the world.
At the top of the San Sebastià cable car tower, surrounded by sea mist, there was a popular xiringuito bar that served paellas with an aerial view of the port. Underneath were the, Sant Sebastià Baths, where there were three pools, bushes and palm trees, and hall from the time of the Universal Exhibition of 1929 in ruins that gave the surroundings a shabby chic look. There, another character Violeta la Burra would sunbathe in eccentric outfits and provocative poses.
We lived on the tour boats Les Golondrines where we would do performances in the middle of the sea and go on many love trips. At the break of day, when the fog made the water look as white as milk, we would go to the wave breaker – a great Barcelona tradition – and lay stretched out across the fishermen’s wooden platforms hanging over the sea. Among the concrete columns someone had constructed a tiny paradise perfect for having family meals out of cement. The port cranes also threw their colours onto the awakening city. All this filled my head and my paintings bursting through my studio, flooding it with their colours. We would often have breakfast at the Fish Market next to the Clock Tower, right where Paral·lel meets la Meridiana, after having jumped from one place to another to the music of the Turmix themed parties that took us to hell, or heaven, which is where we place everything that, we can’t exactly describe, but don’t want to lose.
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Ruta Graf in collaboration with Santa Mònica. Text by Francesca Llopis, visual artist
This route is a collaboration with Santa Mònica as part of the exhibition The Other Side
Translation of the text by Victoria Macarte
