Disappeared Exhibition at CCCB Barcelona

For decades photography has helped to denounce the worst aspects of human barbarism. And this is one of the best examples of photojournalism with a firm commitment to denouncing these crimes, an exhibition which reveals the emotional involvement of its creator, the photojournalist Gervasio Sánchez, who has worked on it since he was a student at the Bellaterra faculty of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

In Disappeared, an exhibition you can see at the CCCB, Sánchez has documented the forced disappearance of thousands of people in ten countries in Latin America, Asia and Europe, along with the drama experienced by the families of the disappeared when their corpses are found (the ones that are found!) in common graves, identified (those that can be identified!) classified and stored and, finally, returned to those closest to them.

The remains were found in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Spain between 1998 and 2010. “We weren’t able to document the graves there are in Catalonia because no Catalan government has ever wanted to exhume the bodies. The pain of the victims has been forgotten. It’s shameful”, says Sánchez.

Only 231 graves with 5.300 victims have been found in Spain, half of them unidentified because there is no DNA bank and many relatives of those killed in the Civil War have long since died.

Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona

Free activities in Barcelona during summer!

Whatever you’re into, you can enjoy summer to the full in Barcelona! Even if you’re on a budget, there are many free activities this August.

Outdoor cinema buffs can head to the CCCB in the Raval for the annual “Gandules” cycle, which this year complements the contemporary culture centre’s intriguing exhibition on labyrinths.

Films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville or David Lynch’s Lost Highway are screened from Tuesday to Thursday at 10pm. Get there early to grab a sandwich and a seat.

For the ideal combination of art and air conditioning, check out one of the many free exhibition centres in town. They include the Caja Madrid Espai Cultural in Plaça Catalunya, Gaudi’s Pedrera, and Palau Robert on Passeig de Gràcia, which takes you on a tour of the Mediterranean. Caixa Forum on Montjuic explores the work of internationally renowned Majorcan artist Miquel Barceló.

What’s more, other museums and galleries waive their entry charge on Sunday afternoons, including the Picasso and the nearby Design museums in the Born, or the CCCB and the Virreina photography space in the centre.

For those that prefer to be outdoors, the many lovely parks in the city offer a shady haven from the heat, and a very special experience at night, set the scene for free concerts in classical music, jazz and sarsuela.

And if you’re in party spirits don’t miss the lively and colourful street celebrations in Gràcia, in the third week of August, and Sants in the last week, with their extravagant street decorations and live bands in the evenings.

Gandules’10: open air cinema at the CCCB in Barcelona

More than ever Gandules 2010 is full of fiction: lost, aimless characters, endless searches, journeys to the unknown… The cinema has often shown labyrinths and has made them explicit. But this cycle drives us through other labyrinths, those that are often unseen: the invisible labyrinths that lock individuals in social circles, or the imaginary ones that create desires and mental escapes. What does it happen when the labyrinth is not an image, but a state?

Lost, lost, lost is a cycle about the desire for movement: get out of a place, escape, change or get transformed, conceive another world. Because what is important may not be to chose the wrong path, but the possibility to start a new one.

Director/s: Ray Ashbury, Luis Buñuel, Vittorio de Seta, Claire Denis, Maya Deren, Morris Engel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Hammid, Abbas Kiarostami, Barbara Loden, Joseph Losey, David Lynch, Chris Marker, Ruth Orkin, Óscar Pérez, Alain Resnais, Elías León Siminiani

Gandules 2010: Lost, lost, lost | Open air cinema festival: from 03/08/2010 to 29/08/2010
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) -> Montalegre, 5 | Ciutat Vella

Dies de Dansa Festival in Barcelona

Núñez i Navarro Hotels, with 9 hotels in the center of Barcelona, sponsor the Dies de Dansa Festival Barcelona from 1 to July 5, 2010.

Dies de Dansa is an international contemporary dance festival in urban spaces. It is a free annual cultural project born in Barcelona, which is part of the GREC Festival de Barcelona. During five days buildings, streets, parks and plazas flood with life in this encounter between dance, urban space and community.

Dies de Dansa takes place in different points of Barcelona, such as the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), the Joan Miró Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), the Picasso Museum; as well as in the cities of Mataró, Sabadell and Sitges. The daylight programme consists on the presentation of short performances that artists elaborate specifically for each place, with the participation of over 25 national and international companies.

Dies de Dansa also programmes Workshops for the community, a series of free dance workshops suitable to professionals and amateurs, and the workshops Dance within the Family, which throughout experimentation, creativity and research, stimulates the emotional bonds in a fun way.

Xcèntric Festival at the CCCB’s cinema

From ecstasy to rage. Fifty years of alternative Spanish cinema (“Del Éxtasis al arrebato. Cinquanta anys de l’altre cinema espanyol”) is the title of the exhibition that Xcèntric, the CCCB‘s season of experimental cinema, has brought about and which is currently taking place in Barcelona.

The project has already visited Melbourne’s ACMI, New York’s Anthology Film Archives and Washington’s National Gallery, and has been released in DVD box format.

This is a project that traces fifty years of experimental cinema made in Spain. It looks for affinities between different authors, often little acknowledged in official cinema history.

This is because the exhibition, whose exhibits have been selected by Antoni Pinent, enables us to find numerous directors regarded as “amateurs“, who in fact, when seen in the light of current work, become extremely interesting.

The exhibition, which take place during Xcèntric’s May sessions (on 11, 13, 16, 23 and 30), will allow us to view works by José Val del Omar, Manuel Huerga, Isaki Lacuesta and David Domingo, among many others.

BAC! 09 – The Barcelona Contemporary Art Festival

The Barcelona Contemporary Art Festival BAC! 09 opens Pandora’s box. At least, this year’s date with international creation is subtitled “Pandora’s Boxes“. An ironic title, as we won’t find all humanity’s ills there, rather an assertion of feminine art, but without any of the clichés normally associated with it.

Neither social criticism nor discourses on gender discrimination; the sixty-or-so female artists whose works are on display in BAC!’s main exhibition at the CCCB, free of charge, prefer humour, irony and a fresher perspective.

This is what we find in Ariadna Arnés’s photos, in Hanamaro Chaki’s illustrations and Bárbara Sánchez Barroso’s embroidery. You can be sure to find installations and videoart there too, such as those by Marta Jiménez Salcedo and Ms Woolman.

One of the highlights of this tenth BAC! is the section entitled “BAC! CAM“. This will feature one of the fullest retrospectives on women’s videoart.

To be more specific, the programme called “Indomitable Women” reviews female videoart over the last forty years, from the field’s pioneers like Maya Deren, celebrity names like Yoko Ono and Joan Jonas, up to more recent creators like Dora García, among others.

X Festival Internacional Barcelona Art Contemporani – BAC Pandora’s Boxes  – website Festival
From01/12/2009 to 03/01/2010
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB): C/Montalegre, 5

NN Hotels: www.nnhotels.com

Xcèntric comes to the CCCB in Barcelona

The 9th season of the Xcèntric cinema programme at the CCCB will be kicking off on 3 December with a range of films whose very length prevents them from fitting into conventional programmes. In addition, this season of Xcèntric will embark on an international itinerary taking it to Australia, the United States and Japan.

This new season starts out with the intention of exploring films which, by their very format, especially their length, cannot fit in with cinema or television programmes.

The best example of this is provided by Andy Warhol’s long films. On 6 December you will be able to see Empire, an eight-hour long film in which the pop-art artist depicts New York’s Empire State Building. You can also take part in the multi-screening of Outer and Inner Space, a film conceived for showing on two screens.

At the other extreme, we can find a whole series of works not even a minute long. Xcèntric will be offering a retrospective on films by the Fluxus movement, including pieces by Nam June Paik, Paul Sharits, George Maciunas and Yoko Ono.

The first session of this new season, on 3 December, Film Ist will see the premiere. A Girl and a Gun, a film in process by Gustav Deutsch, made from a montage of other films.

Website Xcèntric Festival.

9th Docúpolis, the Barcelona International Documentary Festival

The best documentaries are being shown at the CCCB (Barcelona Centre of Contemporary Culture) until to Sunday 4 October, where over 100 documentaries await you from all over the world.

Keeping to their line of offering groundbreaking and committed documentaries, this will be the 9th edition of the Docúpolis provides a platform for spotting and showing new audiovisual languages with little chance of appearing on TV or cinema screens.

The documentaries competing in the competition’s various categories for this year’s official festival awards have been selected from more than a thousand submitted from up to 63 countries.

Without doubt the pick of the official awards is the Docúpolis Award for best documentary, with a prize of 6.000€. This year 12 documentaries with very different themes and from very different locations are in the running.

One of the twelve that stands out is the Argentinian ‘Mundo Alas’, which will be screened at the inaugural session and is a road movie describing a tour of Argentina undertaken by some young artists with various physical and mental disabilities.

Docúpolis 2009 – Festival Internacional de Documental de Barcelona at l’Auditori del CCCB 
From 29/09/2009 to 04/10/2009
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) – Montalegre, 5 | Ciutat Vella District

NN Hotels: www.nnhotels.com

The Jazz Century exhibition at CCCB

Jazz, together with film and rock, was one of the most foremost artistic happenings of the 20th Century. This exhibition offers an across-the-board reading of its complex history, based on a chronological structure providing a narrative thread that follows a timeline marking the main events in the history of jazz.

The exhibition “The Jazz Century”, on at the CCCB, gives a chronological review of the relationship between jazz and other disciplines. So, the exhibition demonstrates the influence of jazz on the works of Picabia, Man Ray and Mondrian as well as the creation of its own set of aesthetics based on covers, concert programmes and other publicity material.

Where: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)
c/ Montalegre, 5     www.cccb.org
When: from July 21st to October 18th

NN Hotels offers you a special package: Discover Barcelona at the rythm of Jazz, including a 2-nights stay at the Jazz Corner JR Suite and free admission & one drink at the Bel-luna Jazz Club. Click here for more details.

GANGS OF THE 80s at CCCB in Barcelona

This exhibition, organized by Amanda Cuesta and Mery Cuesta, offers a view of juvenile delinquency cinema, which peaked between 1978 and 1985, focusing on its relationship of retro-feeding with the press of the time. The exhibition also acts as a faithful reflection of the urban, social, political and economic transformations that were sweeping through the country at that time.

The starting point of «Gangs of the 80s» is the figure of the juvenile delinquent formed by the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency cinema. The codes of representation of juvenile delinquency found in this cinema genre have continued to the present day in such a way that the stereotype of the juvenile delinquent, subject to an aestheticising process, continues to excite fascination.

The presence of young delinquents in the media is the key to understanding their iconization. El Vaquilla and El Jaro are the brightest stars in this universe, real heroes of marginality, thanks to cinema biopics: Navajeros, the saga Perros Callejeros and Yo, El Vaquilla. These films form the backbone of gang culture cinema.

This exhibition tackles the survival of this juvenile delinquency phenomenon since its rise and the tragic end of many of its protagonists. Hand in hand with a new generation, an aesthetic pirouette has occurred by means of which the juvenile delinquent of the eighties has risen to become a cool icon. The icon today, especially on Internet, flies freely.

From 25 May 2009 to 06 September 2009  |  www.cccb.org
Opening hours: From Tuesday to Sunday: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. | Thusday 11 a.m. at 10 p.m.
Closed: Non-holiday Mondays

Nearest hotel to the exhibition: www.hotel1898.com

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