David Bestué reflects on Barcelona in "Ciutat de sorra" at the Fabra i Coats centre

Fabra i Coats: Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona presents Ciutat de sorra by David Bestué, an exhibition curated by Marta Sesé that proposes a change in the way of looking at the city of Barcelona.

Bestué asks: What shapes the history of a city? As if a storm had brought to the surface everything that we do not contemplate as hidden, forgotten or cornered, the artist fills the three floors of the new space with a Barcelona story that travels between personal memory, dream and exhaustive research on the margins of museography. It builds a story that contrasts the projected and dreamed idea of Barcelona (ambitious urban planning projects in the form of a model or the conception of the city from a perspective of progress and technical advances) with a contrary and popular reality (in the form of images distributed in the press, revolts or cries against, embodied in newspapers that remain in the collective subconscious of all those people who live in the city). That is why it uses both symbolic and material elements.

In his research, the artist has worked with references from a more or less recent past, to which are added elements of the present, many of them the result of an exhaustive sweep of the press of this period, an immersion of more than 6 months in the newspaper library of La Vanguardia. He uses the newspaper as a source and as a material, literally, building different pieces with its cellulose. For a large part of the exhibition, Bestué places us in a time frame that covers approximately from 1979 to 2011, from the first democratic city council to the beginning of a new paradigm with the 15M movement.

On the first floor dedicated to the exhibition (PB in the center), elements are mixed together that make up a kind of museum of curiosities, remnants of the past. As broken pieces of history, there is a flower that grew in the dunes of Can Tunis in the 1930s, now gone, sculptures made with slag from the Sant Adrià sewage treatment plant, a rope woven from palm tree remains, a sculpture of cel· lulose made from shredded newspapers, etc.

In addition to using material elements linked to the city that capture his most affective and poetic life, Bestué collects works by various authors. As witnesses of this collective subconscious, it includes vestiges of urban projects such as the 1992 Olympic Shooting Range, the work of architects Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós, currently stored in a vacant lot in the Vall d'Hebron. A fragment of concrete and a bench have been moved to the center room.

On the next floor, there is a collection of models of urban planning projects of the dream city referred to by Bestué, Models with a zigzag structure, recovered from different archives of the city. They coexist with a video creation, Projected diaries (destruction, models, counters, strings), where the artist collects headlines and images from La Vanguardia with a song by Hidrogenesse that has been created expressly for the exhibition from headlines selected by bestué

On the top floor, the artist presents a set of sculptural works. All the pieces have been made for this exhibition with materials that make up the story of the exhibition (as carried by the storm to which it alludes): Sculptures of shredded newspaper, Plaster wall partially covered with kingfisher petals , jasmine and poppy, and Pilares, among others.