BASP

cr

Born at Matiz Gallery, Barri de l’Art Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera (BASPcr) is a neighborhood lab that seeks to restore exhibitions to one of their original purposes: places where art, community, and social imagination converge — spaces for collaboration, self-organization, and empathy. Our first step was to ask a simple question: who are we as a neighborhood? In 2024, with support from the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB), Matiz carried out a psychogeographic study to uncover both the pressing problems and the collective strengths of Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera — collectively known as El Born.

Aerial view of Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera neighborhood (El Born)

A Global Tradition of Art as Resistance

This approach is not new. Across the Global South, art spaces have long served as shelters of truth and resistance. In Algeria, theatre troupes and poets carried the independence struggle into villages; in Palestine, poetry readings grew into mass gatherings of collective defiance; in Colombia, colectivos like Teatro La Candelaria invented collective creation as a way of merging art with grassroots organizing; and during apartheid in South Africa, art centers such as the Market Theatre, the Community Arts Project, and the Medu Art Ensemble turned creativity into a weapon of survival and solidarity. These examples remind us that art was never only about beauty — it has always been a way of imagining, resisting, and living together.

  • BASPcr is a collective project that seeks to organize the cultural agents of Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera and to house artistic and cultural initiatives under a shared set of principles. At its base are two convictions:

    1. Immigrant groups are a recognized and primordial force, with the potential to drive social change and contribute profound artistic richness.

    2. Art and culture are basic principles for social cohesion and empathy.

  • Building on these foundations, BASPcr will develop three key actions:

    1. A publication that both analyzes our neighborhood’s cultural dynamics and serves as a guide for how to self-organize at the neighborhood level.

    2. Digital tools, developed with HCU Hamburg, that measure and analyze social and cultural participation.

    3. A year-long cultural program that highlights the art and culture of local immigrant groups and weaves them into the wider neighborhood fabric — shifting the narrative from stigma to recognition of their richness and beauty, with the ambition of making this an annual tradition.

  • BASPcr matters because our neighborhood is ground zero for Barcelona’s housing crisis, one of the most polluted areas in the city, and home to diverse migrant communities that remain invisible in cultural decision-making. These realities — systemic racism, displacement, environmental injustice and a deep disconnect between citizens and institutions — are exactly why we need new spaces of collaboration, empathy and self-organization. BASPcr responds by using art to make these problems visible and to transform them into opportunities for solidarity and cultural strength.

Let’s work together