The book is a collaboration of eight local and international artists from various backgrounds and disciplines, each using the same medium; line drawings and strokes on paper, black on white; and free to express themselves through performance, installation or investigative studies, whether it’s using numbers, music or voids to interpret their ideas. Essentially, this book is a means of celebrating a special place during an uncertain moment in time in a language common to all (art).
Each artwork is an original and will be Screen Printed by hand by one of the artists, and signed by each creator. Participating artists were specially selected to contribute based on their diverse skills and disciplines, creating an experimental dimension to this book, with an element of ‘the unknown’ surrounding its final destination – not dissimilar to the journey of Passage de Piera residents today.
THE ARTISTS
Ely Daou
An abstract story – Passatge de Piera
Randomness is the quality or state of lacking a pattern or principle of organisation; unpredictability. One way of thinking about “randomness” is that it is a way of expressing what we don’t know. In 1923 the story of the Passatge de Pierra started, when its first residents stepped into their new homes. The last trace of Colonia Castells, that hosted different generations is going to disappear, leaving behind individual and collective memories lived and shared within its community, along with a lost random history. Like any other story this one has an end; this end is defined by a specific date, 2018. Ely Daou
Katerina Ashche
Why nostalgia?
My first intention when I saw the houses was that I wanted to buy one. Then I decided I would find an investor to purchase the whole street. Then I asked myself: Why am I doing this? Why do I want to preserve what is meant to be abandoned and destroyed? Why do I want to breathe life into each and every piece of old furniture, a torn of a wallpaper and a shard of a tile? I am running away from my own memories. I am trying to heal my own sense of loss. I am trying to forget the ruins of the past that I am leaving behind. I am trying to find a shelter that still holds on to life. Katerina Ashche
Lucy Costelloe
By the pictograms: Les Corts
This work deconstructs the origin of the names of the streets surrounding passatge de piera. Most are named after individuals (men) or violent events in Spanish history, and many relate to the displacement or enslavement of native people, whether it be the ancient Iberians under Roman rule (the people of Montnegre), Dutch rebels in the Thirty Years War (Carrer de Breda) or the indigenous populations of Spanish colonies (Carrer de Equador and Nicaragua). The pictograms seek to highlight how passatge de pierra is just one thread in a pattern of the displacement of people for the economic or social benefit of more powerful institutions or peoples. Lucy Costelloe
Luis Guerra
Notes on a disappearance
It is impossible not to be moved by what disappears
with what ceases to be
with what inexists
and insists
a passage what is it? It is a space where we can
simply pass
that is to exist inexistently in the insistence that
you can stop being without losing
to yield is to overcome
the plasticity of our homelessness
to reside oscillating in the vibration of ab-errancy
Luis Guerra
Natalia Toro García
Flows, what was and what will be.
The neighbour living in front,
the neighbour living on the side, those from two houses beyond.
The one that arrives by car,
the ones that arrive on foot.
He who arrives late, alone or with friends. Those who meet in the garden.
Some greet, others do not.
Transited road.
Street that is a playground.
Street that is meeting room.
Street that is a social place, good and bad looks, smiles and other things.
Street without neighbours.
Silent street.
Oriol Texidor
Resurrection
In the pencil case they had been left, obsolete, the “rotring variant pen” and the “staedler marsmatic 700”, from the last time I used them, when I finished my architecture career, in the year 2000. I get ready to clean them meticulously, as I had done so many times before the eruption of computer technology. I disassemble them and submerge the different parts in a glass with hot water so that the dry ink is softened. After the purifying immersion I dry them well, I reassemble them, fill in the tanks with new ink and… they work! They are the tools that – together with the paralex, the set-square, the math compass and the french curve– made me an architect 20 years ago. On a sheet of vellum paper, I redraw the urban plan of the Colònia Castells, just as I could see it every day from the window of the room where I spent all my childhood and youth. The same room where I used the rotring during all those years to earn my architecture degree. Similar tools used to draw the original plan almost a century ago. The rotring has resuscitated. Oriol Texidor
Rebecca Lyne
Witness – Listening
Dedicated to Agustina and to all those who have held moments of their lives within the walls of Passatge de Piera.
18/11/2017
Sunset 17.29h
95 minutes
Start 16.41 and 30 seconds
Finish 18.16 and 30 seconds
The body placed at the transition between 2 buildings, between an empty home and one still hosting life. The ear placed directly on the empty building, the other open to the street. Acknowledge all sounds that pass in that time.
The act of witnessing these buildings and the lives they hold over a period of transition from one state of existence to another. To hold in recognition and acknowledgement, the moments that pass. Each minute in honour of the life span of these buildings. To hold in memory, echoes of lives passed and passing moments of current lives. Rebecca Lyne
Zahra Dar
“We all lived in the same house”
Every neighbourhood carries specific aesthetic details of its spaces. Associating daily occurrences and impressions to them, they are embeded as part of the whole image, the image that we later refer to as memories. And once these spaces no longer exist, the details become vehicles for story telling. But how realistic is the description we give when listeners can only imagine without knowing how it truly was? In this piece, the artist creates one home using elements from of all of them. Descriptive texts are included to refer to each of the elements, particularly their colors. Considering the readers of this publication can not see the colors that are being discussed, they can only imagine what this home truly looks like. Much like when we tell stories of neighbourhoods that no longer exist, and how the listener can only fabricate an image in their mind, using their imagination. Zahra Dar
THE BOOK
The colour of the book cover is reminiscent of the old and faded bricks used in the abandoned houses, and the dry leaves that have fallen on the ground.
The house facades printed on vellum paper evoke memories of places that soon will cease to be …and the artists’ interpretations are printed on thick, textured paper, creating a covert communication through one’s senses.
Conceptually, the book represents a house. In each house there lived about 8 people; 8 artists live in this book. Each artist is different, each one comes from a different artistic discipline and each one has a very personal interpretation of this transition.
At the end after the acknowledgements, we leave the Passatge passing through the neighbours’ doors and blurred memories and we return to the street, the bricks, the fallen leaves.
This is an event that will not happen,
set in a place that is no more.
It the end, all that will remain,
is a book.
alexia medici 