Barcelona Metropolis

A monument to pay tribute to the refugees who make it to Barcelona; graffiti that alludes to the most neglected neighbourhoods; a plaque laid in the pavement that reminds us that this is a city of peace. They are contemporary Barcelona’s memorial spaces that, far from the traditional monument, signify the collective memory and seek to strengthen tolerance and coexistence.

The core feature that differentiates the city’s relationship with history and memory is that the inscription of urban history demands the patrimonialisation of the past, while memory demands it is made visible.

Patrimonialisation entails the official recognition of the city’s history, without necessarily involving the collective will. It is taken for granted that certain buildings and monuments are a historical legacy that must be preserved. Over the years, they have become cornerstones in the building of a city’s identity, indications of its historical specificity that also correspond to the evolution of certain aesthetics that ultimately constitute both its heritage and its potential for attraction.

History crystallised through heritage is the hallmark of a city and also its international letter of introduction. Let’s remember, in this regard, the “Barcelona, posa’t guapa” [Barcelona, get pretty] campaign, initiated in 1985 with the aim of restoring buildings, and which enjoyed its crowning moment in the 1990s when the city was preparing to host the 1992 Olympic Games. The city’s history is also tangible in monuments and signs of differents kinds that seek to commemorate events or figures from a past that symbolically represents the city and, by proximity, the people who live there.

The city of the 21^st century, however, has another way of crystallising its relationship with the past. If anything characterises the contemporary city, it is the desire to record history through memory, and to cast light on – or dim – its places on the basis of the collective experience lived. Memory, in fact, that comes to augment, correct, and sometimes amend official history.

In this regard, memorial actions are conveyors of the complexity of historical times and their plurality. They are therefore memorial representations that appeal to various groups, contrary to occasional and limited commemorations endorsed by the conventional monument. One could say that the contemporary memorial represents collective memory while the traditional monument portrays the vicissitudes of the national hero or national feats.

The removal of the monument to Antonio López (2018)

Plaça d’Antonio López

The removal of the statue of Antonio López in the square of the same name sparks off the debate on how to deal with Barcelona’s colonial past and its repercussions, and encourages, in turn, a no less important reflection on Barcelona’s economic boom in the mid-19^th century and on urban development in general: at whose expense?, with what money and on what ethical basis were the city’s major works carried out, including parts of the Eixample’s urban development and much of modernista [Catalonia’s cultivating of fin-de-siècle ideas and trends from the Art Nouveau movement] architecture?, what does the figure of Antonio López i López ultimately represent from a contemporary perspective? López, banker, businessman, man involved in the slave trade business in Cuba, recipient of the title of Marquis of Comillas at the end of his life and honoured with a sculpture dedicated to him one year after his death in 1884, undoubtedly embodies a controversial and dissonant legacy.

Removing Antonio López’s sculpture from its pedestal was a decision taken by the city’s Commissioner for Historical Memory created at the beginning of Ada Colau’s first municipal government (2015-2019). On the one hand, it can be understood as a tactical gesture in the context of international and also national iconoclasm, and as a response to a longstanding civic demand from associations such as SOS Racisme Catalunya [a movement of anti-racist NGOs] or Tanquem els CIE [a campaign to shut down immigration detention centres], which considered it inadmissable to keep a monument and the name of a square dedicated to a figure linked to slavery. On the other hand, it sought to distinguish the action of a certain tradition of removing statues, especially pro-Franco ones, which had been carried out in Spain, without a ruckus and at night, as if it were performing the duties of democratic memory but without attracting attention or unleashing possible riots. López’s removal was a deliberately visual act, which sought to attract public attention and participation and even to provoke reactions: Commissioner Ricard Vinyes, insisting on the “right to memory” against his duty, backed a collective removal of the awkward statue, conceived as a popular celebration on a Saturday morning with music, fireworks, circus acts and hot chocolate, a slow, festive farewell. López left via a municipal crane and left his base empty, keeping, however, the original dedicated inscriptions “A. López i López ” of 1884.

However, this is not the first time the statue had been removed: during the anarchist revolution, in the summer of 1936, the monument was destroyed. The statue, now in the municipal warehouses in the Zona Franca [Barcelona’s logistic and industrial area], was recreated in 1944 during the Franco dictatorship by the sculptor Frederic Marès. In 2020, a powerful ephemeral and pedagogical action reminded us of this episode: the memory of the anarchist demolition was recreated, at the initiative of the Observatory of Everyday Life, the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation for Libertarian Studies and the Popular Encyclopedic Athenaeum through the temporary placement of a macro photograph of the time in front of the pedestal without López and thus contextualising the (double) void. The presence of absence and void is powerful as a kind of counter-monument to the fact that still needs a pertinent explanation of the process of deconstruction and delegitimisation in situ.

The continuation of López’s name in the square three years after the statue was removed is highly questionable. It thus makes visible a hitherto unresolved conflict between a participatory process and its regulatory framework: an unsuccessful multi-consultation that keeps on standby the changing of López’s name to that of Idrissa Diallo, a young African refugee who died at the immigrant detention centre (CIE) in Zona Franca in 2012. It would become a permanent reminder of our shared responsibility in a declared “city of refuge” for those who arrive “undocumented”, whose acceptance is a difficult and sometimes impossible process.

Mural Amb les nostres mans [With Our Bare Hands] (2019)

Plaça del Doctor Matias Guiu, La Teixonera

What happens when the language of subversive urban and street art becomes the official municipal language? Roc Blackblock is an emblematic case of a graffiti artist closely related to the anti-fascist, squatter and anti-system movements that helped turn graffiti and muralism into a means of collective expression in the city. He declares on his website that he “makes his creativity and graphic language available to the community to turn the walls into loudspeakers of the shared memory of residents, groups, communities and social movements”. This calling made him, under the current municipal government allied with social movements, an artist who receives commissions for official murals from Barcelona City Council itself.

One of these murals is Amb les nostres mans, created in 2019 as part of the actions of the Pla de Barris [Neighbourhood Plan], a municipal programme to reverse inequalities between neighbourhoods through the installation of Taules de Memòria [Memory Tables], among others, in Sant Genís dels Agudells and La Teixonera. Residents of all ages, but especially the elderly, were invited to share their memories of the formation of these neighbourhoods following migration to Barcelona in the 1950s and 1960s. At the heart of the conversations and shared testimonies, the beginnings of shacks, social organisation, and later, more solid self-building emerged that determined the urban development of the city throughout the 20^th century. It is the most forgotten story of these neighbourhoods that also suffered from disrepute and discrimination. However, the popular organisation made major moves towards improvement, and even pre-Olympic urban development took into account the neighbourhood demands in its major programme of creating public spaces.

A shared photograph on the Memory Table, referring to the self-built house at number 1 on the street Carrer de Josep Sangenís between 1960 and 1962, is the motif of the mural Roc Blackblock was commissioned with and reproduced in late 2019 on a very visible wall in the neighbourhood, adjacent to the entrance to the underground. This graffiti, turned into a tool of memory policies, represents a recognition of the phenomenon of self-built homes as grassroots urban planning that until recently had been a phenomenon not made visible. Amb les nostres mans is, at least for the time being, a politically correct work, as are other works by the artist dedicated to the demand for historical and anti-Franco memory, and the aforementioned “right to memory”.

Against this backdrop, a dispute recently arose when spontaneous graffiti by the same author, depicting the emeritus king of Spain next to Franco, was deemed inappropriate and was removed by municipal cleaning squads. Mayoress Ada Colau felt the need to apologise for an action based on regulations governing the removal of offensive graffiti, and even provided the means for it to be reinstated. Undoubtedly, a reversal of the concept of street art and its rebellious and subversive purpose.

Parapet de les executades i executats a Barcelona 1939-1952 [Parapet of the executed in Barcelona 1939-1952] (2019) and Bosc d’empremtes [Forest of Fingerprints] (planned for 2021)

Avinguda del Camp de la Bota, 25

Avinguda d’Eduard Maristany

The years before the crisis of 2008 were marked by a growing replacement of urban concepts and civic forces in a new sense: we can speak of an urban planning erasing traces that found its ultimate expression in the megaproject for the Fòrum Universal de les Cultures [Universal Forum of Cultures] in 2004. That was when the Catalan artist Francesc Abad presented his installation Camp de la Bota, where it is clear that this new convention and leisure centre with seafront promenades had been, during the Franco regime, a place of outdoor executions in front of a parapet.

Between 1939 and 1952, more than 1,700 people – 1,706 to be precise – lost their lives in a place where their existence is now permanently denied by an asphalt platform that covers it. In 2018, a joint investigation by the Commissioner for Memory Programmes and the Barcelona History Museum revealed that the actual location of the execution parapet was currently beneath the sea. Destructive urban development has left the wall in the middle of the new yacht port built at the beginning of the 21^st century.

In 2010, an important first step was taken, promoted by the Memorial Democràtic de Catalunya [Democratic Memorial of the Government of Catalonia]: although a little far away from the leisure areas and not very visible to passers-by, a plaque explaining the events was erected in the place where the wall was believed to have been. In 2015, the creation of a civic platform helped restore the name’s visibility in the urban space, and also honoured the shantytowns of the working people of this urban periphery that for decades overlapped with the political violence synonymous with the place.

On 24 February 2019, in a crowded event chaired by the Mayoress of Barcelona and the Mayor of Sant Adrià, a first work was inaugurated on site by Francesc Abad himself. It consisted of the inscription of the names of all the victims of the Franco regime on a wall that is part of the place’s new architecture, with an emergency door located in the centre, an exit that those shot did not have. The outward appearance on adhesive panels that the artist himself calls “ephemeral” is part of an action towards building a permanent memory space.

The Democratic Memorial has gradually taken up this challenge and, in the end, Abad himself will be responsible for creating a memorial site entitled Bosc d’empremtes, a space-park in the immediate vicinity of Camp de la Bota, within the new Diagonal-Besòs campus of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. The project uses fingerprints from the records of the fatalities that are part of the artist’s archival work and at the same time evokes the very powerful concept of Walter Benjamin who states that history is not linear, but must be built from the present.

Bosc d’empremtes represents the set of victims as a unit, as do the trees that make up a forest. Moreover, it alludes to the individuality of each fatality, with their personal story, and the historical circumstances in which they lived and that encouraged a personal stance in relation to the Franco dictatorship. It also tells us about the emptiness and the unique imprint left by each of the people executed in Camp de la Bota. It is a very local and at the same time very universal memorial – installed in a place of globalised infrastructures located between Barcelona and Sant Adrià – that fulfils the duty of not forgetting that the maximum cruelty of a regime became the standard in a specific neighbourhood of the city, and that later the imprint was removed in a kind of local “pact of silence” to comply with what the city understood at the time required urban development.