Next Saturday, November 23, starting at 11am we’re playing the first game of the first scene of
Bellvitge live role-playing
, oh, yeah!
Creating a role-playing game with these characteristics is proving to be tremendously complicated and very exciting at the same time. After several months of work in collaboration with the
Necronomicon’s Role-Playing Club
of L’Hospitalet, we will play the first scene of this game set in the 50 years of history of the Bellvitge neighborhood in the
Poble Espanyol
of Barcelona. The game is open to all those who want to play: to sign up, just send us an email to
To develop this first scene, in addition to our friends from Necronomicon’s, we have had the collaboration of a group of students from the
Institut Bellvitge
and the Grup de Teatre Imaginari de Bellvitge i Altres Fantasmes, as well as the participation of the
Banda de Música Amics de la Música de Bellvitge
.
This first scene, which we have titled
The Ambassadors of Bellvitge
, is based on a not very well-known episode in the history of the neighborhood: in 1969 the construction company CIDESA raffled off 40 «tourist-social» trips among the residents of Bellvitge to various cities in Spain, which they would visit as ‘ambassadors’ of the neighborhood. This embassy was received by the authorities and inhabitants of these cities with whom they strengthened ties and to whom they would explain the benefits of living in Bellvitge.
The newspaper La Vanguardia Española (currently La Vanguardia) echoed in its pages, in what appear to be complete advertorials, the “innovative” marketing campaign of CIDESA, coinciding with the commemoration of the «fifth anniversary of its construction activity [in Bellvitge]», as explained in the caption of the image accompanying this entry. On this page (Wednesday, July 23, 1969 edition) the act of constitution of the embassy is explained in great detail, during which the trips were raffled and prominent artists such as
Georgie Dann
performed. On this other page (Tuesday, September 30, 1969 edition) we can see the ambassadors on their way through Madrid, Granada and Seville.
We started to devise Bellvitge live role-playing at the beginning of this year, and from the beginning we presented the project to the
Bellvitge50
working group, a group promoted by the
Associació de Veïns i Veïnes de Bellvitge
and the
Centre d’Estudis de L’Hospitalet
, open to the collaboration of all those who want to contribute to the commemoration of the half century of life of the neighborhood and in which we had already been participating since its constitution in 2011.
Initially,
The Ambassadors of Bellvitge
was going to be set in the ceremony of constitution of the embassy, when the trips were raffled, but finally it will be set in the visit of the «expeditionaries» to various cities. This change results from having “meshed” Bellvitge live role-playing with the programming of
Espai 14-15
.
As we explained here, Espai 14-15 proposes to move the mediation activities with audiences linked to the exhibition cycle
Arqueologia preventiva
of the
Espai 13
of the
Fundació Joan Miró
to the Bellvitge neighborhood, in which since the beginning of the year we have been developing various processes of cultural work from
the physical space of LaFundició
. With Espai 14-15 we propose to unfold or dislocate the institutional logics of the field of art, exploring what links and dialogues we can establish between contemporary artistic practices and cultural processes that occur in a specific social context that is not that of the artistic institution itself.
The first exhibition of the cycle – curated by Oriol Fontdevila – is by
Oriol Vilanova
, who proposes with his work to reflect on certain historical and ideological connotations of the
Mies van der Rohe Pavilion
and the Poble Espanyol, two architectures built on the occasion of the
International Exhibition of Barcelona
in 1929.
The Poble Espanyol, an architectural complex that brings together replicas of numerous buildings and public spaces from all over Spain, is an ideal setting to play the scene of the ambassadors of Bellvitge; precisely the work of Oriol Vilanova points out the scenographic and spectacular character of both the Poble Espanyol and the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, a characteristic that, in some way, we want to reverse by activating these spaces as spaces for play.
There are several examples of artistic institutions that have opened spaces and programs outside their headquarters; usually these spaces and programs reproduce the ways of doing things typical of the artistic institution in diverse social contexts, without taking into account that in these contexts there are cultural practices that we can consider as valuable and relevant as that of contemporary art. Thus, with Espai 14-15 we do not intend to “bring art closer” to our neighbors in Bellvitge following a colonialist and enlightening logic, but to find spaces for dialogue between their social and cultural practices and those of the field of contemporary art. At the same time, this also implies, of course, addressing from cultural practice and contemporary art the ways in which historical narratives and the memory of the place are constructed in the context of Bellvitge (but we will talk about this on another occasion).
It seems significant to us that the work of Oriol Vilanova has given rise to this scene in which residents of Bellvitge will visit the Poble Espanyol, replicating the role of those ambassadors of 1969, while at the same time reversing and transforming, even if only temporarily, the spectacular logic of the site, a logic to which the Fundació Joan Miró itself is also subject. These contemporary ‘ambassadors of Bellvitge’ of ours do not present themselves to the artistic institution as spectators object of an educational action, but as subjects who have collectively constructed a knowledge and a practice and who, in some way, even if only temporarily, perhaps displace and dislocate the places and ways in which discourses and ways of doing things are legitimized and valued in culture.