100 Spanish Days

I’m in El Raval again, in this hostel I stayed in for a few weeks in March, where I met the Finnish guy and the Argentinian too, where I had some fun.

For one full month, this April, I lived in a place situated in a street accross the road where stands this magnificient building Art Nouveau, the Hospital de Santa Creu i Sant Pau, just a few blocks away from the Sagrada Familia. A decent area, with very decent people, with shops and fitness clubs, local associations and kindergartens, a really boring place. But that’s not all: my place was some sort of art studio/dance & theatre workshop/artists residency/live & work space for art people/research & cultural centre,  a “creative platform” as they name themselves. Very much the kind of place I was looking for since the beginning of my stay in Barcelona, so as to meet local creative people and to produce little arty works. Which I did, eventually, some works on paper, a technique called “papiers découpés” with texts that make sense (or not, but I won’t try to explain my artistic approach just yet).

So, in the end, I made it! I totally, fully, almost faithfully achieved the goals I had, developed the projects I had in mind, getting the lifestyle I was imagining. Except that it wasn’t quite so satisfying and the whole experience brought me to consider going back to Paris pronto. There are many reasons for this: first, no one can live in a house/flat where the daylight never ever comes in, through no window whatsoever. No light and no fresh air either. Living in that sort of boxes teaches you the real richness on Earth, the only real things that matter for a human being: water, air, light… There is nothing else to life.

The other reason why I gradually started to feel bored is directly related to the BCN art scene, if you can call it an art scene. I wrote somewhere how I found most of the exhibitions, shows, presentations, cultural events here rather disappointed, to such an extend that I thought “Barcelona is so overrated”. I still believe so and I also have to agree with what some encounters, during the first days of my stay here, told me about the local creative people: a bunch of pretenders, “people who give themselves a name “artists” because they think it’s cool”. Maybe I’m blasée, maybe, coming from London and Paris, my views about art have become too demanding, maybe I’m too old or too arrogant. Still, I can’t think of absolutely nothing exciting about anything I’ve seen nor anyone I’ve met, artistically speaking, and people seem very proud of themselves, very self-centred, very pretentious to top it all. Arty-farty indeed!

So now, I’m back in El Raval, accross the road, there’s Poble Sec, with lots of these people in there too, but that’s okay because I don’t have to live with them.  There is Montjuic for my promenades and the Mediterranea for my relaxation, that’s all I need really. Water, light and air, no art. Art is, among other things, the expression of an existencial angst. There is no such concept in Spain, where the climat, the weather, the blue skies and the sunshine forbid, de facto, any form of odd longing feelings, any sort of melancholic moods. Nothing like the North, with its cold rainy days and grey skies, its tormented, serpentine, agonizing skies. Ah, ce mal anglais!