Photography: Antonio Closas Díaz. Train passing through Avinguda Amèrica in Bellvitge. Municipal Archive of L’Hospitalet
This afternoon (Thursday, February 14) at 7:30 PM we are opening the exhibition with
Sitesize
We live in Bellvitge, Catalonia ends here! Murcia starts here! at the
Museu de L’Hospitalet l’Harmonia Espai d’Art
.
This exhibition is presented as an open dialogue with the city and with some experiences in Bellvitge, a possible itinerary through imaginaries and the experiences of inhabiting this neighborhood of L’Hospitalet. The starting point is a work in progress that articulates between different communities and groups in the definition of their identities and representations, as well as the imaginary of the territory.
In 2015, the 50th anniversary of the construction of the neighborhood will be celebrated. The
Associació de Veïns de Bellvitge
and the
Centre d’Estudis de L’Hospitalet
are promoting the project
bellvitge50
, a proposal that aims to collect documents generated in the neighborhood in these 50 years, produce new ones, and design a range of pedagogical materials to make it easier for the stories of Bellvitge to appear in the curricula of the educational centers of the neighborhood and of L’Hospitalet.
From L’Harmonia we want to contribute a look from contemporary creation and open a space for meeting and reflection to the celebration of the anniversary of Bellvitge. We would like to be able to activate a common space full of differences and from where the most invisible practices, spaces and groups in the construction of historical memory can rewrite a range of stories that problematize from where, how and why of the normalizing narratives.
The exhibition is structured in two axes: We live in Bellvitge and Catalonia ends here! Murcia starts here!
We live in Bellvitge shows through the work of LaFundició with the collective
Candel’Hart
and the artist
Jessica Espinoza
an archive of serigraphic images built collectively that began in December 2011 and was shown for the first time at the Centre Cultural Bellvitge-el Gornal in February 2012. The work process has sought to review the agreed imaginary around the historical memory of the Bellvitge neighborhood and to find a way to introduce new voices, nuances and contradictions that move us away from epic stories but bring us closer to new possibilities of understanding our realities from the multitude of conflicting stories that run through us and therefore to rethink and reconstruct them.
In this framework, we propose to a group of 2nd year of artistic Baccalaureate students from the
IES Bellvitge
and their tutor Ana Recio, to work on the realization of some cartographies that represent in a mutable panorama the different cultural manifestations that had taken root, insinuated, frustrated or denied within the territory. These moving cartographies want to become a tool that can reactivate in the neighborhood a complex vision of culture in close relation with politics, economy and society and with the need for the direct involvement of citizens in its governance.
The exhibition will also feature the documentary video
Las mujeres de Millones
that we edited together with María García within the framework of that project and a new video that documents the drift through the Bellvitge festival with Manuel Delgado that we organized last summer with the collaboration of CandeL’Hart.
On the other hand Catalonia ends here! Murcia starts here! is an initiative of Sitesize that travels through several exhibition spaces in the metropolis of Barcelona and that tries to connect the photographic and documentary collection of the project with local realities and communities. This project was born in 2011 with the purpose of revisiting some of the places in the metropolitan region in different times and circumstances, where forms of popular self-learning are manifested that made culture a means of emancipation.
On this occasion in L’Hospitalet, a selection of the project’s documentary collection is shown together with an investigation developed by Sitesize based on textual and photographic archive material of the recent history of the city of L’Hospitalet and the neighborhood of Bellvitge in particular. This work wants to connect with the experiences of social construction from culture and neighborhood initiative in Bellvitge to recognize its rich history of social and cultural activation and also its contradictions. From the cross-reading of what these archive documents tell us and the attention paid to current actions and stories, an audiovisual work is proposed to reread in the imaginary of the neighborhood, the role that the process of self-learning, direct action, the female condition and the commitment of the women of Bellvitge in the neighborhood struggles has had.
Laboratory: In parallel in these two axes of work, a part of the exhibition space is destined to space for the production of contents of the groups that collaborate in the project. At the same time this “laboratory” space offers and will remain open to the contributions of the entities and people who wish to do so during the entire time that the exhibition lasts.
Within the framework of the exhibition we want to convene two public sessions to share and evaluate the work done: a debate table on the social construction of the women of Bellvitge and another around the creation process initiated in the IES Bellvitge.