L'Hospitalet de Llobregat is not the new Brooklyn, nor does it need to be. Chaotic and calm at the same time, the second city of Catalonia has the only secular procession in Spain, which every Easter gathers crowds around the Plaza de la Bòbila. It was born in 1977 to some Andalusian immigrants sick with longing who placed the image of a virgin on a chair and began to walk around the neighborhood.
The neighbors followed them. Forty-six years later, the arrows bounce off the facades of the evangelical churches that have sprouted like mushrooms as a result of the new Latin American migration. The city breathes mix and coexistence. It is a city fractured by the social stigma and the train tracks that cross it, but here there are still people on the street, bars of those of a lifetime where they offer you a free tapa for the drink and having breakfast does not compromise your budget for the day
It is no coincidence that in recent times it has acted as a siren song for hundreds of creators. The artist's experience has a lot to do with the search for uniqueness and how to survive. "Maria, but do you always have to be stained with paint?"
A lifelong neighbor greets the artist Marria Pratts at the doors of her studio, an old industrial warehouse between workshops and garages inside which, with the help of the artist and designer Guillermo Santomà, she built a cardboard shelter with a wood-burning stove and bathtub. “A luxury cabin”, she quips herself. For years it was her home.
"I couldn't afford a studio and a house," he says. She arrived in 2015 out of necessity. Her studio 50 meters from her in Poblenou forced her to "draw at the foot of the bed" and she looked for a wide space with high ceilings to paint as big as she wanted. She has managed to live off her painting. She exhibits in New York, Los Angeles, Paris or Hong Kong, although her neighbors continue to confuse her with a wall painter. "Once in a while someone tells me: 'This job is hard, eh, Maria!'"
Marria Pratts is part of the more than 500 artists, architects, musicians, designers, gallery owners, photographers and filmmakers who, fleeing Barcelona due to the pressure of rents, are transforming what was once a depressed and disused industrial area into a vibrant creative cluster.
The commitment of the Cultural District, a project by the philosopher and writer Josep Ramoneda at the request of the mayoress Núria Marín to make culture an engine of the city, has been key. The artistic migration had started earlier, but they knew how to detect it and have promoted it. Artistic migration had begun before, but they knew how to detect it and have promoted it, accompanying artists in the search for spacious and open spaces, clearing bureaucratic obstacles or tax benefits for the owners of old warehouses, warehouses or metallurgical factories turned off by the crisis . Today there are entire buildings that are authentic creative nurseries. The Freixa building, La Tonal'H, Espai Salamina, FASE, Trama 34, the Cobalt building...
But l'Hospitalet is not the new Soho either. The scene is behind closed doors, practically imperceptible, without chic boutiques and exclusive restaurants that give it away. On the contrary, the polygonal aesthetic prevails. Inside La Veloç, an old disused sawdust warehouse, time seems to have suddenly stopped. The light filters through the windows, the fog invades everything and the sound of the rain that falls from different points makes metallic diamonds dance in an overwhelming choreography. "There is no human presence but the place contains traces that prove there was in the past," says Lolo, half of Lolo
Nearby, the warehouse where Lolo works
A stone's throw from La Veloç, on Avenida Carrilet, the artist Jordi Colomer and the producer-agitator Carolina Olivares run La Infinita, a self-managed project in a 700 m2 premises where the millennial generation (performers, actors, dancers, musicians, writers, visual artists...) have the space and freedom to try things that may not work. Take risks. They bet on live arts, the barter economy and their name says it all.
"In reality we want to be multigenerational and multi-everything, which is difficult," admits Colomer. From Cristina Morales, the author of Lectura fácil, to Salvador Sunyer, the director of Temporada Alta, the filming of the series Self-Defense or the Nigerian combo from the Christ Disciples Fellowship church on Pau Casals Avenue, have passed through here. They are, together with the musical space El Pumarejo, one of the few meeting points. Although, Olivares points out, “at the moment there is no center, we form a fairly horizontal network. The tide is there, but it is invisible."
L'Hospitalet has always lived in the shadow of Barcelona, but things could be changing. Some galleries have also opted to leave a city stressed by the dizzying increase in rents. After Nogueras Blanchard and Ana Mas, both in an old factory on Isaac Peral street, a little later etHALL changed its headquarters in the Raval for a much larger one on Salvador street, and in the middle of the pandemic the Alegría gallery arrived from Madrid Doctor Fourquet, the nerve center of Madrid art, a stone's throw from the Reina Sofía.
On the door of the new space, which occupies the 300 square meters of an old industrial complex, Ronda de la Vía, hangs the same sign, with its graphics inspired by the Far West, which already identified its first location in 2011 before moving to Madrid: a tiny nine square meter turquoise booth located in the inner courtyard of the old Lehmann Factory. It was once the smallest gallery in Barcelona.
Sebastián Roselló and Patricia Donohoe needed a change and here they have found the opportunity for “our artists to grow as artists and we with them as a gallery”. Being on the periphery is no longer a problem. Their project is not about waiting to attract customers who come through the door, but about investing the money they save by giving up that centrality in supporting artists they believe in. "Two years ago I discovered a painter, Mai Blanco, who worked in a tiny space in Gràcia. I thought that she would never get there that way, so with the money we would have spent on a fair we offered her a studio so she could work for eight months. We sold everything", recalls Roselló, who now repeats the formula with Pablo Morata.
“Our generation does not have the capacity to gentrify anything”, say Sociedad 0, a team of designers (Mateo Palazzi, Juan and Ignacio Ezcurra, Sara Torres and Èlia Bagó) who were expelled from Poblenou and now occupy an open space on the Rambla de La Marina with views of the soccer field of l'Hospitalet. From the large windows of the premises where they live and work (coexistence is part of an ever-changing project) a crane and a development of luxury apartments can also be seen. The specter of gentrification is too familiar to ignore: a run-down or run-down part of a city is colonized by artists, a café culture flourishes, new businesses set up shop, then rents go up, and the original inhabitants who gave the place character are gone. being banished. At the moment, it seems a long way off.
