During my recent trip to Barcelona in Spain, I took the opportunity to revisit some places associated with the year that I lived there (1993 to 1994). Back then, I did a postgraduate degree in painting there, through a UK art school that ran a satellite "study abroad" program in the 1990s. The school rented two buildings for the twenty or so artists: one in the heart of the Gothic Quarter, steps away from the Museo Picasso; and one in Poble Nou, a working class district on the eastern edge of the city.
The first photo above shows me in 2022 in front of the building in the Barra De Ferro, a narrow side street between Carrer de la Princesa and Carrer Montcada in the Gothic Quarter. The building accommodated an office for the course leader, a printmaking studio with press for the printmakers, and small partitioned studio spaces for artists. In common with most of the buildings in these narrow medieval streets, it was constructed with thick stone walls, a heavy wooden door, and large arched windows. The interior of the ground floor occupied by the art school had a ten foot high ceiling supported by solid stone arches.
I can remember going in and out of that building many times over the course of the year, meeting up with friends to see how their work was going, strolling with them along the street for lunch at one of the bars, or attending meetings with the course leader and talks by visiting artists. The ground floor seemed to be empty when I passed by in April, but I was pleased to discover that until recently it was still used as a printmaking centre by the EINA printmaking space. Here is the only photo I could find of the inside of the space:
My studio was in the Palo Alto building. In 1993, I was disappointed at first when I was allotted a space so far from the city centre (about thirty minutes door to door via the subway/metro). But when I saw the buildings and the location, I was pretty happy. Palo Alto is a set of former warehouses and small factories built in the early twentieth century for leatherworks and other light manufacturing. The former workshops and warehouses are surrounded by a wall that encloses them all in a small compound. The art school rented one of the smaller buildings, a two storey stone barn. Here is what it looked like in 1994 from the outside:
It was fairly primitive: a sliding wood door that opened into a small bare lobby, a single sink and toilet, stairs up to a mezzanine level where I shared a studio with another artist, working back to back, and then the right-hand section of the building was open to the ceiling and partitioned at floor level to make eight small workspaces. There was no heating, so it got pretty chilly in winter despite the Mediterranean climate. The larger space also had a glass roof, so in summer it became baking hot. But it was a great place to work, with a great bar just outside the gates (Bar Paco, named after its owner, who offered a $5 menu del dia and liked to talk about FC Barcelona) and a short walk to the beach.
The art school cleared out by the end of the 1990s, and since then all of the buildings in the compound have been upgraded and developed into a multi-use arts space, with an organisation that serves as an incubator for arts-related businesses, a well-known design firm, a cafe, and a regular market. My former studio building is now (I think) a gallery space. I found this photo of the interior, which looks very like the same space:
The day I went to Palo Alto in April, they were setting up for a weekend event, so I wasn't permitted to enter the compound and have a look around. But I didn't mind too much. I revisited these places not so much from nostalgia, a desire to relive the past and bathe in memories and regret, but partly, yes, to see how I would react. As with the Barra de Ferro space, I was just happy to be there again, to think for a little while about a formative time in my life.
It would have been tempting when revisiting places that meant so much to one in former decades to fall into the trap of the old returnee, lamenting the loss not just of
temps perdu but also railing against the inferior state of the modern replacements, the decline in civilization "since the old days." But I didn't feel that at all. Yes, I felt some twinges of emotion, brought on by the collision of vivid memories from thirty years ago with the unlikely event of my presence in the city again. But most of the changes in these art studios were for the better, and I was happy that the buildings continued for decades as spaces that artists and visitors could enjoy.
