© Xavier Ribas - Sundays (Barcelona Pictures) (1994-1997) 26 C-Type print 120 x 140 cm. Edition of 6
If you take a stroll one sunny Sunday morning through the peripheries of Barcelona you’ll come across a strange landscape. Between the motorways and housing blocks, the industrial states, the commercial centres and sports complexes; between the nature parks and the theme parks, at the edge of all this contemporary urbanization, you will find the marginal areas where folk flock together every weekend to spend their free time. The question is: Why do people turn these residual spaces into the centre of their leisure activity?
(Extract from Perfect Distraction in Xavier Ribas, Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca 1998)
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‘Xavier Ribas dissects the phenomenon of entertainment, of leisure, of what people do in their ‘free’ time, showing the extent to which such activities take place in the city’s residual spaces. Quite spontaneously, people preserve, manage and recycle these spaces, effectively keeping them out of the efficient, productive order of the city: places for walking, sunbathing, picknicking, sport and exercise…It seems paradoxical that these spaces –not yet codified, as yet without regulation- are where people still have a chance to take the initiative. As Ribas concludes: ‘Freedom can only flourish in a residual space that might, as a result, have a desolate appearance’. Although his documentary approach is guided primarily by an interest in anthropology and urbanism that leads to narrative images laden with little anecdotes, the photography –at once incisive and indulgent- sets out to imbue that desolation with a touch of Mediterranean irony’.
(Extract from Joan Fontcuberta’s text on Xavier Ribas’ photographs in BLINK, Phaidon Press, London 2002. p.313)
© Phaidon Press / Joan Fontcuberta