© Xavier Ribas - LC (2002-2003) 22 C-Type prints sizes 47x39 cm and 47x57 cm. Edition of 3
A Ruderal Ecology
“The flowering that always occurs before the instant of extinction”. Iain Sinclair
LC is a small neighborhood at the edge of two cities, accessible only via bridges and tunnels, either over or under a train track, a ring road, a motorway and a river. In some ways it is an island, an overgrown space in the imaginary of someone’s childhood. The fate of the place was sealed by an urban plan back in 1859, which designated the area as within the limits of a proposed metropolitan park along the west bank of the river. This bourgeois utopia, envisaged on agricultural land at a time of incipient industrialization, persistently failed to become a reality. The ‘big forest that never was’ kept the place under siege for over a century and a half, haunted by possibility and erasure, under-funded and ignored by complacent authorities, obliterated by floods and heroin. Like most frontier territories, construction historically took the form of demolition. LC is now an invisible place, unknown to the majority of inhabitants of the cities that engulf it, with the exception of developers, residents, and local activists, flowering before the final moment of extinction, with a handful of rundown workshops, a few families resisting their relocation, a triangular square and a Christmas tree.
© Xavier Ribas (2004)
Text in Spanish and Catalan (Pdf)
Barcelona, Pla Cerdà (1860)
c.1950s
La Vanguardia / Culturas 14 Feb 2007