Aventura 24: MACBA

http://www.barcelonaemotion.com/en/visiting-macba-in-barcelona/macba-barcelona-4/

MACBA.  Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.  The museum was as much of an exhibit, a work of art, as what was inside! Walking up the ramps right inside the windows and looking out on la Plaza de Angels and the beautiful sunny day was like walking through an art piece - or it has that special feeling, that "ish" feeling (for those who have read the wonderful children's book Ish.)

We had ventured to the MACBA for the photography exhibit Centre Internacional de Fotografia Barcelona (1978-1983).  This exhibition, with photos from many different artists, chronicled the everyday life of the late 70's, early 80's in Barcelona.  These years were the Transition; years marking the change from a dictatorship to a democracy, which was not easy.  While students and certain political parties were ready to move towards a democracy, the church and parts of the military wanted to maintain the dictatorship.  There was a great amount of terrorist acts and many people feared a second civil war.  Thanks to King Juan Carlos I, when Franco died in 1975, the king took charge and gave the country back to the people, asking them what they wanted and what the majority wanted was a democracy.   Then followed one of the quickest transitions to a democracy, writing up the Spanish Constitution of 1978.  

This Centre Internacional de Fotografía Barcrlona existed in those years of the Transition as an experiment in photography and art.  A key theme to the photography produced there was recording the everyday life of people living in Barcelona and its neighborhoods during that time.  The photos were taken by teachers and students alike.  As the MACBA website describes, 

 It is a collective representation of a traumatised city at the end of a long dictatorship, prior to the urban renovation of the 1980s, at a moment of emergence of new micropolitical social behaviours and new forms of resistance that would lead to the recovery of the public space. 

http://imaginarycity.net/2012/02/12/centre-internacional-de-fotografia/

This type of photography is very different from the kind I've been used to while being in Barcelona - that of climbing Montserrat or watching the sunset over the water and taking a picture.  This type of tourist photography doesn't have much meaning to me - I take pictures for the blog, yes, but it doesn't have as much meaning for me because I can't always capture how I actually felt there.  But these photos, I felt like I actually got to know people - I could intuit their personalities and feelings.  I could place myself in the streets and in the time period.  Walking through these walls of photos, I met people who lived during the transitions, from old ladies and men, to younger people our age to families living on a couch in an abandoned parking lot to a group of circus performers in Sitges.

Each museum I go to I see different techniques, different mediums, but there's beginning to be a recurring theme.  The way I learn and enter into the world of a city I'm unfamiliar with either because it was a different time period or a different place.  But I'm realizing this ability of art, more so than a textbook, to pass on the feelings, history, thoughts, and culture of a place 70 years ago.  While looking at these circus photos or of the mom and daughter from la Maleta Mexicana exhibit, you feel as if, for that moment, you are right there with them.