HIDRÀULICA BARCELONA INSTALLATION

Hidràulica is an interdisciplinary art and architecture project in a historic building in the district of El Guinardó in Barcelona. The 100-year-old apartment building has been inhabited by the same family for 90 years, and has been uninhabited and partially dilapidated for the past ten years. The apartment building and people who have lived there have both experienced construction work and the dream of a future, the Civil Spanish War, Francisco Franco’s rule and the transition period after that, development of the metropolis of Barcelona. Children have been born here and people have died, again the building stands with the patina of 100 years. In 2020, grandchildren of the one of the first owners took the initiative for an interdisciplinary artistic documentation of the building before the building is renovated and new people move in. Architect/sound artist Gisle Nataas and photographer Cesc Sales were invited into the process by Sílvia Cabrera, who has worked with video recordings and is the initiator of the project.

In the process, the house’s 13 different rooms, the house’s sounds, light and material qualities are recorded in the form of sound recordings, staged images and video recordings over a period of two years. The recordings have been processed, put together and taken back to the house as a short on-site installation over two days in July 2022 where invited guests could experience the recordings of the building in the same rooms where they came from. The installation was co-curated by Vanessa Pey Ribas and Gabriel Virgilio Luciani. The installation consisted of the installation of a multi-channel sound installation with 10 speakers, 9 photos, 2 films and 1 performance. The project primarily describes tactile, partly invisible qualities in the building but the intention is also to create a new project independent of the housing estate. The way those registrations play together creates new stories that both can point backwards and can be perceived as fragments of memories and stories from the house, but can just as well point forward and be perceived as a life to come. The sounds can be experienced as simple clean registrations, but the collage can also be perceived as people’s dreams, fragment of the modern city which is constantly changing, fragments from the Spanish Civil War, the fear surrounding Francisco Franco’s rule etc.