Alba Mayol

Artist, 2021, Resident

June
In collaboration with Salamina

The mountain blocks / Temporary athenaeum

Following the curves of a hillside, whenever one leaves Barcelona, the coloured houses can be seen, like a dreamlike image. Clean and rational housing blocks, painted in pastel shades, placed like tightrope walkers drawing a landscape on the edge of the city. The neighbourhoods of Can Franquesa and Les Oliveres, in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, were built in the early 1970s to house working-class families coming from other areas of the Iberian Peninsula. A massive letter A inside a circle is part of its ecosystem, as if the streets were reporting micro-narratives of lives on the periphery of the urban experience with a primordial sound. The mountain blocks and their plurality of daily struggles, like the waterfalls in its streets appearing through the cracks in the rock, can be read as the possibility of material and subjective dwelling, there where a desire for a community of care flows.