Urban District Art Festival

Talk about the importance of restoring public space by citizens

Poblenou is the Barcelona neighborhood of artists, of the counterculture, of urban experiments and therefore also of that socio-economic phenomenon known as gentrification. For this reason, when Poblenou Urban District proposed to us to carry out a curatorship for the neighborhood's Open Day, we thought it very appropriate to deal with the subject in three interventions, one carried out by Inocuo on a container, another in which we bombed an old factory together with all the neighbors industry that is doomed to disappear due to gentrification itself in a creative exercise of citizen reappropriation. The last action was an open-air cinema on gentrification through art programmed by the researcher Javier Abarca, the projection was made up of different documentaries that address the issue such as "Right to Wynwood" in Miami or in the New York neighborhood of Bushwick.

Text by Javier Abarca_

“The centers of many cities are experiencing strong changes. Long stigmatized areas become trendy, rents skyrocket and original neighbors are forced to move. And art is always in the middle of these processes.

In recent years, large murals have become the most common tool to transform the image of a neighborhood. Javier Abarca presents this short video-documentary cycle that collects different visions of the phenomenon through statements by artists, cultural managers and neighbors about key international cases.”