“El Bon Pastón”

18/08/2010 admin 0

This short video documentary was made in 2004 by Núria Sánchez Armengol and Luciano Literas, starting from a series of recordings taken in the neighborhood of Bon Pastor in Barcelona. The popular casas baratas, 784 one storey “low-income” houses built in 1929 for immigrant workers, were undergoing the polemic “Urban renewal Plan” that entails the complete demolition of the neighborhood. In this documentary you can listen to neighbors’ voices, some agree, other disagree with the demolitions; while a special highlight is given to the resistance of “Avis del Barri” association: elder inhabitants of the “casas baratas” who struggle against the City Council’s Urban Renewal Plan. The same year, a few km further, the same City Council was building the “Forum 2004” and the residential estate “Diagonal Mar”. The video presents a critical reflection on these processes and on the impact of real estate speculation and urban renewal on Barcelona’s residents who are involved in it.

http://dvactivisme.blip.tv/file/493383/

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From “Plan de la Ribera” to “22@”: the transformation of the shore of Barcelona

14/08/2010 admin 0
"It's just like giving a knife to a 2-years-old child: they don't know what they're doing. That means, that we'll have beautiful buildings, but we have to look where they built them. There were things there, before".Jaume Pagès, former worker of Can Ricart
Between 2005 and 2006 we had been working on the neighborhood of Poblenou, under two different points of view. Historically, we tried to reconstruct the processes of resistance of residents of Poblenou that, in the sixties and seventies, were struck by the ambitious "Plan de la Ribera", with which the francoist mayor Porcioles tried to turn the northern shore of the city in a residential and leisure area. Ethnographically, we studied the contemporary processes through how residents and workers of the neighborhood reacted to the not-less-ambitious "Plan 22@", with which the socialist mayor Joan Clos, between 2000 and 2004, tried to turn the biggest part of Poblenou in a residential and leisure area. The work was too great for our forces, and finally we had to abandon the idea of studying the whole neighborhood of Poblenou (200 hectars). But we made a series of interviews with former activists and inhabitants about the "Plan de la Ribera", and many interviews about a particular case of "22@", the factories of Can Ricart.
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Let’s begin with a poem

14/08/2010 admin 0
This is an excerpt from the last verses of Pierpaolo Pasolini's Le ceneri di Gramsci, written in Rome in 1956. To us, this is the beginning of everything; it still contains almost everything. "A gridare è, straziata da mesi e anni di mattutini sudori - accompagnata dal muto stuolo dei suoi scalpellini, la vecchia scavatrice: ma, insieme, il fresco sterro sconvolto, o, nel breve confine dell'orizzonte novecentesco, tutto il quartiere... È la città, sprofondata in un chiarore di festa, - è il mondo. Piange ciò che ha fine e ricomincia. Ciò che era area erbosa, aperto spiazzo, e si fa cortile, bianco come cera, chiuso in un decoro ch'è rancore; ciò che era quasi una vecchia fiera di freschi intonachi sghembi al sole, e si fa nuovo isolato, brulicante in un ordine ch'è spento dolore. Piange ciò che muta, anche per farsi migliore. "

Des del Ressentiment (Barcelona, 2006)

14/08/2010 admin 0

Short documentary film we realized in 2006 on the factory of Can Ricart (Barcelona), under the effects of the “22@” urban renewal plan. All the industries and organizations that used the XVIIIth century stucture had to leave, as well as most of the inhabitants of the surrounding buildings. …

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Barcelona’s “La Mina”: a goldmine for city planners

14/08/2010 admin 0

“See how La Mina is changing, you can reed on a huge poster from Barcelona’s Ronda Litoral highway, past the enormous buildings of La Mina. This neighborhood was built in the ’60 to give housing to the inhabitants of the gypsy neighborhood of Campo de la Bota”, when the coast of Barcelona had to be cleaned, just where today there is the “Forum”. Francisco Franco himself inaugurated the neighborhood: its scale is still impressive, just imagine how it ways half a century ago to the eyes of those who came from the slums on the beach. In the occasion of 2004 Forum of Cultures, La Mina received another “integral urban renewal plan”, driven by the Consorcio de La Mina: after many years of useless negotiations with the Consorcio, the Platform of associations and residents of La Mina decided to move directly against the project, and asked us a survey on the opinions that La Mina’s residents have about the urban renewal plan. This report has been used within the legal actions that the Platform moved against the project. It’s very different to watch how La Mina is changing from a car running on the Ronda highway, and to see it through the eyes of its residents, in the squares between the buildings. They see the opposite part of the poster.

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From the center of Sevilla to the “3000 viviendas”

13/08/2010 admin 0
Polígono sur. El arte de las tresmil, de Dominique Abel (España-Francia, 2003) WATCH THE ENTIRE MOVIE. Life and art of the gypsies who lived in the historical districts of the center of Sevilla, evicted and now living in the neighborhood known as the "3000 viviendas" in the Poligono Sur. "Our roof was the sky. Now we have houses; heating; fridges; but we miss what we had before, those ideals we had before. Do you remember how it was in Triana, we had nothing to eat but we were in grace of God, with only a tomato, singing and dancing, no shoes, we didn't get ill".
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Camp de la Bota, 1974

13/08/2010 admin 0

13-1-1974, images from the archive of the journalist Maria Favà, taken in the slum of the Campo de la Bota, during the demolition and deportation of its residents towards the new blocks in La Mina (in the background). Now this area is known as the “Forum of Cultures 2004”. A memorial stone mentioned the thousands of political prisoners executed by Francisco Franco in this part of coast; it asked “peace, but not oblivion”. It was removed to celebrate the “Forum”.

  • PHOTOS OF CAMPO DE LA BOTA (Maria Favà, 13/1/1974) [ALBUM]
  • Campo de la Bota in the movie “Yo el Vaquilla” (José Antonio de la Loma, 1985) [link to youtube]
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Naples, 2013 Forum of Cultures

13/08/2010 admin 0
"The first edition of the Forum of Cultures, in Barcelona in 2004, was a failure: the ambitious program of cultural events served only as a cover for a huge speculative operation on the popular neighborhood of Poblenou and on the city coast. In the same way in Naples, Forum 2013 will be the Trojan horse through which heavily revalorize for tourism and real estate the city's historical center and the area of Bagnoli, speeding up the expulsion of the low-income classes towards the peripheries, and to increase constructions on the coast of Coroglio".