BAC! to the future

Barcelona will close this week its eight edition of the BAC! Festival. Free, fresh and really contemporary it has made a grateful effort to connect Art with our daily challenges in life. And this year our friends from La Santa have chosen the symbol of Babylon to gather a world of artistic proposals, visions, ideas and expressions to vindicate the city that is reinventing itself periodically. It couldn’t be otherwise: For the first time in humankind, more people are living in cities than in rural areas.

As Gigi, Juanjo and Juan describe it in the official programme of the Festival, “in this world of globalization, countries are identified by their cities as settings of the daily confluence of millions of people. Phenomena such as global migration, socio-cultural interaction, art, fashion, new technologies, gastronomy, alongside with a growing loneliness and depersonalization, have “fed” a new urban model based on an exhausting rhythm of life”.

These four weeks of activities and shows have been far from exhausting. If you have the chance, visit, before the 20th of December, the permanent exhibition at CCCB (Centre de Cultura Conteporània de Barcelona), where you’ll be able to rethink our contemporary world through the vision of international artists like the Japanese Ai Kijima and her embroideries, the black emoticons of Funny Fun With Guillaume (France), Mariana Vassileva’s a/v art and e-music (Bulgaria), Fran Meana’s “Paisaje con cámaras de seguridad” (Spain); how the artist Yamila Fontán (Argentina) reinvents the wheel –you will not see it, but feel it—at the sensual and intimate installation “Nocturna”, how Seb Janiak (France) created urban visions before the irruption of digital photography or how Rita Martorell vindicates casual cuisine. Of course, you’ll discover why “Arquitecture of density”, the urban landscape pictured by Michael Wolf (Germany, USA) in Hong Kong was chosen as this year’s BAC! Festival’s image.

Since 2003, after the USA and its allies invaded Iraq, Babylon lost its symbolism as first metropolis in History to become a daily evocation of chaos, occupation, destruction and culturicide. BAC! Festival, if understood, helps to restore the spirit of the first urbanites. It’s no surprise that this trip through our most recent contemporary art ends with the creation of a new symbolic currency, the “Euroafricans” and the chance for every visitor to design its own ideal urban space.

For more info, please visit:
http://www.bacfestival.com/
http://www.cccb.org/
http://www.euroafricans.org/