Festa Major de Gracia. Barcelona.

Street Party.
Every August the quiet neighborhood of Gracia throws a week long street party. Neighborhood associations spend all year to build crafty, scrappy, large scale sculptures to decorate various streets in the neighborhood. The sculptures, built by volunteer community groups in local garages and cellars, are made of recyclables such as bottles, cans, candy wrappers, old computer parts, paper mache, etc, and are meant to be a festive backdrop. Each street has a theme: primarily using scale shifts, recontextualization, and repetition, local craftsmen assemble gigantic installations based on very simple motifs. A few of this years themes include: heavy metal monsters, Don Quixote, sea creatures, sardines, sausage and cheese, shipwreck, bingo and spaceships. The photo to the left is of a lonely wave, cresting onto a dirty sidewalk.

Here we see a cartoon version of a swiss chalet sticking out of a perfectly normal 1990's style apartment building. Decoration themes seem to be chosen at random, but they express the occupation or preoccupation of the locals, no matter how wacky they may appear. Perhaps this one is offering an argument that speculation is forcing everyone out of the city: real estate went up 35 percent over the last two years alone. The medium price for a small, normal apartment is 250,000 Euros; that swiss chalet is looking kind of desirable right now.
Most of the hardware stores in the area run out of electrical cable and circuits. The local bookstores do not sell out of electrical safety manuals, and the public safety inspectors in the city are on vacation.
Although this one did not win a prize, these giant bingo cards look proud, warped, and frankly more interesting than anything showing in any museum in Barcelona right now. *(Except for the Francis Alys show, which looks kind of similar somehow.)
A swarm of paper flowers. One popular technique is to make thousands of small objects and fill the sky with them. Simultaneously delicate and overwhelming, they also tend to fall apart in the sudden ocean breezes that sweep through the barrio.
Here we see a lovely display of fashionable abstract painting laying right there in the street. Although coming from humble motives, the painter has managed to stay on top of the art game with fresh colors and a bold "modular" assembly system.

Common materials are used to transcend the everyday. Here, candy wrappers are applied carefully to form heavy- metal, cyber-vampire images. This work takes on new meaning at night when hundreds of smashed local suburban "anarchists" and a few english tourists set dumpsters on fire, break bottles, urinate and puke from 2 until 7am.

Photos and text by A. Bergman

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