| A SOCIAL SCULPTURE
Those of us who live in an urban space on a
daily basis often have to put up with it more than we enjoy it. There are
plenty of reasons for this: work, stress, audio-visual saturation, haste
.. The LIGHTING UP BARCELONA! action wishes to give us the chance to
marvel at what is right under our noses: a city-space full of
possibilities. This is not, however, an exercise in passive contemplation,
but something constructive, which aims at achieving a new, original point
of view.
The LIGHTING UP BARCELONA! action wishes to
create a magical meeting point in which all the potential of the future
will appear. One of the vital motors of any society is its culture. To
light up this motor in a way which is collective, generous, unusual and
civic is, as I see it, a fine reaction to the time of great changes which
we are living through.
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The LIGHTING UP BARCELONA! action offers
Barcelonans the challenge of lighting up a candle for each inhabitant. The
challenge should function as a catalyst which reveals the complexity of
the social and associative fabric of the city.
The idea for this action came to me in Pokhara
(Nepal), where I had arrived by bicycle after having left Barcelona, in
1984. During the Deepawali festival, in which all the city lights are
switched off and candles are lit everywhere, this stunning sensation of
suddenly being a part of the world was produced. I asked myself if I would
be able to relive this sensation one day.
The LIGHTING UP BARCELONA! action is the
result of this wish to share a collective, generous emotion, created by a
civic link between people, associations and collectives within the
framework of a city-space, and to transform it into an ephemeral, plastic
event which will become a memory.
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