BARCELONA PRIMITIVA book

BARCELONA  PRIMITIVA

GINA VERSTER

my new photo-essay book depicting the older and newer layers of Barcelona from the provocatively primitive to the radically elegant, from the rapturous Casa Batllo to the cerebral Pavello Mies van der Rohe, all aglow in shades of barça blanca...

Please feel free to preview it here...
BARCELONA PRIMITIVA

Graçias/Merci/Thank you!

pre-occupy any space...

 from the cozy compactness of a single city bench in copenhagen...

to the barren brushland beside looming suprarchitecture in barcelona...

manifest the urgent need to stake out one's piece of ground, if not one's peace of mind...

skullfenestra

within the anatomy of a Gaudi vivarium, no artifice is too minor to address in symbolic narrative...
the skull-shaped windows rise up through the aqua-tiled spine towards the surface light from their watery depths...

doubledeergirls

large peartears of cherry drop from the honeyhalo...
the tieredtree sprouts from crossed twintrunks...
a pair of bambigirls reach for each other, eyes closed...
and stroke the grittymouth of the blankeyed stump...

l'aigle catalan

crowned l'aliga barcelona, this gegant dances to a solemn chant...
on a wintry sunday morning he appears in the plaça sant jaume...
with his noble wings unfurled, he glides through the flocks gathered
where the flightless aristocracy hides behind drab and tattered feathers...

heart of glass

 a smashed window in a dark alley was hastily taped up with black ducttape...and yet someone took the time to form a heart-shaped outline...

when I look at my out of focus walk-by shot of this shattered window, the blurry image vibrates a strange and intriguing sense of artful tension - wholeheartedness out of destruction, a symbol of love out of a gesture of anger [or accident!], abstract painting out of non-creative intentions...

cara puerta

 

 something about a face on a door, the long knocker for a nose, the mail slot as slightly parted lips, and those strangely glowing hand-painted eyes looking back so quizzically...

I don't know who lurks behind this door-face, but I confronted it with a bright flash from my camera and it did not even blink...I could have banged on its nose or put my eyes to its mouth but it might have spat up a sharp retort...or worse, the whole face could have been flung open to reveal a much more animated and angry one!

modernisme metalico

 

in Barcelona, in Paris, and in other cities, I am always drawn to overwrought ironwork, decorative and functional, imperially elegant and wildly anachronistic, from the sanctioned designs of master metalsmiths and from the florid imagination of one improbably eccentric architect...

Gaudi, whose astonishing swirly creations elevate a city's architectural heritage to a giddy plenitude of art nouveau flourishes, entwined metallic strands into such fanciful flights, they seem alive and in vigorous flux...

[Palau Guell, Carrer Nou de la Rambla, 3-5, Barcelona]

barri digne

every so often around the Ciutat Vella I am distracted by fluttering black and white banners that dangle off balcony railings and window boxes demanding for the right to a dignified neighbourhood with double exclamation marks...

it is a sidewalk-crack-roots protest to bring attention to the deteriorating state of buildings and streets in some quarters that have missed the seductive grasp of gentrification and must now swallow their pride to hang out their really dirty laundry...

barcelona primitivo

doggy love...robot compatible...sign of the times?

even our pets have embraced machines intimately...are we to take heed of the oddness of animal behavior as a premonition of the earth-quaking seduction of artificial intelligence tapping into the power of LOVE??

[the graffiti in Barcelona rock!]

mies barcelona*

it was a pilgrimage to be sure to a structural icon that expanded the repertoire of the modern movement in architecture to the multi-level versions that now tower and dwarf us the world over...
and this singular low-slung and hyper-precise pavilion representing Germany in the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition would endow the rigorous and romulian Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with almost god-like status to all the young architects who have marched on ever since...

[the Barcelona chair was a little tattered with an errant thread trailing out of its tufted stitching - I was tempted to tuck it back into the seam!
and if one stares long enough at the marble walls, monstrous and alien creatures will emerge in hallucinagenic flashes!]


[the Pavello Mies van der Rohe was faithfully reconstructed on its original site in the Parc de Montjuic and opened to the public in 1986, the original having been dismantled after the exhibition]

*more images of this pavilion are posted on my ZYGOSPHERE

futbol demigods

on a hilly neighbourhood above Barcelona, we come upon a school football field where the young local soccer stars aspire to divinate their quick-footwork and power-kicks...
the three tiled plaques mounted on an entrance wall to the field commemorate the long veneration of their all-encompassing national sport at the most elemental level...

[this was the closest I got to touching the catalonian futbol gods on the streets of Barcelona...]

tour agbar

from medieval quarters, we ride through wide boulevards to the Plaça de les Glories Catalanes where rises Barcelona's sexiest landmark, on par with the Tour Eiffel in glorifying a city skyline...
this 21st century tower, designed by a french architect no less, soars like a supersonic jetnose into the heavens and sparking chromatic beacons into the nightsky...ever beckoning to the old iron lady not so far away...

[Torre Agbar, by Jean Nouvel with b720 Arquitectos, 2005]

sur le dos

our flight was delayed for hours because the air traffic controllers at CDG were on strike/at rest and KLM couldn't get permission to fly over french air space...
when we finally flew over Paris, a blanket patch of fairy lights, and landed in Barcelona, we felt like we had made the journey by horseback for days over the snowy Pyrenees and crossing devout pilgrims' paths...
we enter the Barri Gotic, darker and more cloaked atmospheric than the Marais, and found this signage welcoming weary horsepowered wanderers...

[Plaça de Sant Josep Oriol, Barri Gotic]

back from barcelona*

barcelona could be the new paris for me as I have fallen hard for its sensuous insouciance, its cool unconcern for critical couthness, its autonomous axis of catalonian charisma...
all such curvaceous and naturalistic gaudian phantasmagoria swerves into my spatial consciousness floating through some divine streaming light god-fish chamber...and this was only the hallway to the laundry room!

[Casa Batllo, Antoni Gaudi, 1904-06, Barcelona]

*if I may piggy-back barcelona primitivo onto paris primitif for a little while...