Xavier Ribas - Photographer

Installation of Habitus (2007) in the exhibition Universal Archive, The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), October 2008

Most of the housing estates of Barcelona were built in the 1960s and early 1970s*. At the time, they were promoted as a state solution to eradicate the shantytowns of the peripheries. However, the typology of the buildings, along with the lack of public services and the little attention paid to the configuration of the street and public spaces tainted their early years. As in many other European cities, the housing estates of Barcelona were born stigmatized. With the arrival of democracy in Spain, and after long years of belligerent demands by local communities, public investment for urban regeneration was brough in. Now, the housing estates have finally been integrated, to varying degrees, into the urban fabric of the city. Or better, as it’s been said, they have “become city”.

This kaleidoscopic image, made out of 67 photographs with a number of interruptions, attempts to represent something else as well: not only the urban transformation these housing estates have undergone recently, but most importantly how their public spaces are navigated, appropriated, incorporated by their residents. Paraphrasing Richard Sennett, these photographs are more about the flesh than the stones. Stephen Barber wrote that the true character of the contemporary European city is to be found in the peripheries, not in the historical centres, which have become corporate outposts for global tourism, their history pitted-out, turned into an amenity, convenient, pleasant, domesticated. The housing estates here, even when they are turned into 'city' by an act of urban regeneration, exude a strong sense of the body, which could be seen to counteract both an absence of History and the closer impositions of the city. Perhaps the body is the place of the periphery, its history.

* The housing estates represented here are: La Mina, Bellvitge, Ciutat Satèl·lit, Can Serra, Ciutat Meridiana and Badia del Vallès.

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Xavier Ribas. Housing Estates Today: Mixed Fortunes

In the early days of high-rise housing estates, notorious inadequacies in both buildings and services worsened the inflexibility of an urban design dedicated to the compartmentalisation of living functions. This tended to inhibit the role of the street as space of multiplicity and chance – two fundamental characteristics of the city. Such housing estates began life with a bad reputation. Over time, nevertheless, residents have successfully fought for improvements in infrastructure and facilities, private ownership of flats has brought relative security in times of economic crises, and transport links have been improved. Life on the estates has thus proved a tough but effective means, for many thousands of people in Barcelona, of becoming integrated into the city and its citizenship. Different zones have not all fared equally however: in some cases we can even see results of the recent rocketing of property values in the wake of urban improvements (in the Besos area, for example). Other parts of the metropolis are still waiting to make the transition from being housing estates to being, simply, city.

Installation views of Habitus (2007) in the exhibition Universal Archive, The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), October 2008

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MACBA web archive of the project 2007. Metropolitan Images of the New Barcelona.

Photographs by Sandra Balsells, Xavier Basiana, Ana Muller, Lothar Baumgarten, Patrick Faigenbaum, Hans-Peter Feldmann, David Goldblatt, William Klein, Manolo Laguillo, Marc Pataut, Xavier Ribas, Gilles Saussier, Jean-Louis Schoellkopf, Allan Sekula, Andrea Robbins y Max Becher. Project organized and curated by Bartomeu Marí, Jorge Ribalta, Joan Roca.

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Exhibition related files

PDF MACBA, Barcelona. Universal Arcvhive_Press release [En]
PDF MACBA, Barcelona. Universal Archive_Publication [Cat]
PDF Belfast Exposed, Belfast [En]
PDF Colin Darke, With Added Context. Source, Issue 61 p. 61 [En]

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PDF Installation plan