When David Bestué (Barcelona, 1980) visited the exhibition Counterculture and the Underground in Catalonia in the 70s at the Palau Robert a couple of years ago, he had a strange feeling. As if he had arrived late to a party from which only empty bottles and remains of confetti remained. "The ending was a bit sad," he recalls. It seemed as if after that decade of great transformations in values, morals and customs, and an overflowing creativity in culture, the neoliberal Barcelona of the eighties had lost all its freshness. "And I was surprised, because the end of that exhibition was the beginning of my lived Barcelona, which I think has not yet been sufficiently explained," argues the artist, who, from a lucid and intelligent vision, brings out that story. that has remained on the margins, hidden or forgotten, in Ciudad de arena, a large exhibition that occupies the three floors of the new space of the Center d'Art Contemporani Fabra i Coats (until October 22)
Ciudad de arena is Bestué's first major monograph in Barcelona. And from the moment he received the invitation from the center's director, Joana Hurtado, the artist -who has just opened a second exhibition that is part of the same project at the Patio Herreriano in Valladolid- knew clearly that he wanted to talk about the city. Of that Barcelona of sand “that has wanted to change so much that it always ends up falling apart and has lost its image”.
First, he established a time frame, from 1979 to 2011 (from the first democratic city council to 15M) and then immersed himself for six months in the newspaper library of La Vanguardia, tracing the “raw” history in the Barcelona, Events and Culture sections. information or images related “to the city that is being destroyed and that is dreamed of, about which there is apparently a consensus between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians, to simplify it a lot, who seem to go hand in hand in the face of the great events that lie ahead: Olympics, the Forum... But, at the same time, if you look at day-to-day life, you realize that it is a very turbulent moment that stands in contrast to that ideal, dream city, with countless fires in factories and events vandalism against power or against certain groups, the irruption of Terra Lliure or the skinheads, new conflicts as a result of laws such as the Immigration Law, which means for the first time that immigrants are illegal, the arrival of AIDS, which brings with it attacks to homosexuals..."
On the second floor of the exhibition, which is curated by Marta Sesé, a video creation on four screens projects thousands of images taken from the pages of La Vanguardia while a song by Hidrogenesse composed expressly for the exhibition from of the headlines of some of the news that we see on the screen. Living with them, the models of the Vila Olímpica, the Parque de l'Escorxador, the Collserola Communications Tower...
But in reality, Ciudad de arena starts earlier, on the ground floor, where the sculptor Bestué, the creator interested in the relationship between art and architecture, accumulates residues of that Barcelona that has not lived, as if they were remnants of the past that had been washed up on the beach by storm Glòria. An iron bench and a concrete structure that were part of the Olympic Archery Field, which was designed by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós and today is partly dismantled on a site under the Ronda de Dalt; the last specimen of Stachys maritima, a plant that was very common in the Poblenou dunes that was collected in Zona Franca in 1907; or some triangles made with shredded newspapers that refer to the wedges of the sculptor Ulrich Rückriem in Pla de Palau.
The pages of La Vanguardia as material that is transformed into sculptures, as well as the crushed bougainvillea or mimosa flowers that he uses to create a lighting system inspired by the Magic Fountain of Montjuïc, reappear on the upper floor, where Bestué brings us back to a sexier and more festive present in the form of columns covered with petals, sugar pears hanging over our heads or a large ceiling covered with cornflower, jasmine and poppy leaves. “It makes me a little embarrassed, because it's like the most cheesy part”, he confesses, but beyond that more theoretical part about the city, he also wanted to work with more formal issues, with total freedom”.
And, like an invisible thread that crosses the three floors, the poetry of Olvido García Valdés, which, like Bestués's sculpture -Marta Sesé points out- has to do with “'retaining', pointing out very specific facts so that we don't forget them. , and with 'pouring', a matter that has to do with the projection of desire and pleasure”.
