À la Ville de...

À la ville de ... Barcelona" was the phrase pronounced by Juan Antonio Samaranch at 1:32 p.m. on October 17, 1986. Barcelona was becoming the 1992 Olympic host city. A collective illusion was taking over the city, many things would change, Barcelona was going back to the sea, the Olympic Village and a long list of infrastructures that would improve the city that was opening to the world.

Barcelona has lost population since 1992, while Catalonia has increased by 23%. The price of housing has increased 5 times more than inflation. 15 million tourists visit us every year. The word gentrification has entered our everyday vocabulary and every day there are more and more people forced to leave their neighborhood and the city.

The images that Eugeni Gay Marín proposes are a journey from the outside to the center of the city in which the spectator metaphorically transits the slow change that goes from the illusion of a better city to the current one that is expelling its inhabitants. It begins in natural spaces where there is no human presence and ends in the shop windows of Passeig de Gràcia, the maximum exponent of the loss of identity and commercialization.