Contemporary engagements within corridors of the past: temporal elasticity, graffiti, and the materiality of St. Rock Street, Barcelona

In a medieval Barcelonan side-street, urine, rubbish, and a bewildering array of graphic imagery splatters the narrowing walls between two major thoroughfares. A contemporary conflict between residents, unknown artists and others is played out using banners, bottles, stickers, posters, stencils, spray paint, and bodily substances. In this shadowed liminality, local and global debates are superimposed upon substructures constructed from disease, prostitution, and the Saint of the Plague. The continuing urban struggle constitutes temporal statements of dirt and purity, violence and humour, dominance and resistance, death and salvation. Like the renovated facades masking the crumbling remains of structures long neglected, the government’s literal whitewashing of the art is a temporal cover-up of a discursive symptom stretching from deeply embedded preconditions. However, from his niche in the angular bend of the alley bearing his name, the statue of St. Rock remains unblinkingly staring, raised above the contestations expressed below.

Un sant Josep Oriol de l'església parroquial de la Pobla de Segur (Lleida) atribuït a Bonaventura Planella (1772-1844)

Aquest text fa referència a una pintura a l’oli dedicada a sant Josep Oriol, conservada a l’església parroquial de la Pobla de Segur. Arran d’una anàlisi iconogràfica atenta de l’obra, dedicada a un sant beatificat a Barcelona el juny del 1807, un fet que comportà nombroses representacions de la mà dels artistes més notables, apunta la possibilitat, que pogués ser obra de Bonaventura Planella (1772-1844).