Year
2021
Tag
Installations
From one side of a glass panel, the other side remains visible. The room appears continuous, even where a body meets an obstacle. This ordinary property of glass became the starting point for an installation about the divisions within Barcelona: boundaries that do not interrupt the view, but shape the possibilities of a life.
Four transparent panels carried maps and figures concerning income, education, housing and health. Set along a low bed of sand, their surfaces overlapped as visitors moved around them. The city could be read as a shared territory and as a series of unequal conditions occupying that territory.
Sculptural data installation · 730 Hours of Violence · Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona.
Installation documentation · 2021 · Silent excerpt from the exhibition camera archive.
An address is more than a location
The Barcelona sociodemographic survey of 2017 supplied a local basis for the work. Its neighbourhood comparisons made it possible to consider economic and social differences at the scale of a city that visitors might know intimately. Familiar place names acquired a second geography: the distribution of resources and opportunities.
The panels did not explain an individual life through an address. They showed differences between populations and places. That distinction matters. A neighbourhood average cannot tell us who a person is, but it can describe some of the conditions that person may encounter before making a choice.
Transparent barriers
The metaphor of the glass ceiling names a limit that persists even when the route beyond it appears open. Glass Frontiers extended that spatial image across the city. The difficulty of crossing a boundary could coexist with the ability to see through it.
Engraving maps and data into glass made the support part of the argument. A visitor could look at a figure, through it, or at another panel behind it. Income, housing, education and health remained distinct subjects, while their physical arrangement prevented them from being entirely separated in the room.
How a border is maintained
Writing on urban inequality, including Alfredo Rodríguez and collaborators’ study of Santiago, places visible violence alongside the less visible conditions through which cities are organised. The exhibition also considered redlining, a history of excluding neighbourhoods from services and investment. That history offered a comparison about how space can be used to distribute advantage; it was not presented as an identical account of Barcelona.
The resulting installation treated inequality as a relationship between places, institutions and everyday life. Its boundaries had no checkpoint and no frontier guard. They were legible in differences that a map of streets alone would not show.
Drawing divisions on transparent surfaces
Four engraved glass panels carried the maps and data. Wooden supports held the panels upright within a long bed of sand, allowing the transparent surfaces to be read as separate but related boundaries. The drawing separates the glass, supports and base to show how the installation is assembled.
Assembly study · An explanatory reconstruction from the exhibition archive. Components are separated for clarity; proportions are illustrative.
Materials & components
- Four engraved glass panels
- Wooden supports and base
- Sand bed
Selected references
- Ajuntament de Barcelona, Enquesta sociodemogràfica de Barcelona (2017).
- Alfredo Rodríguez and collaborators, Visible and invisible violence and inequality in neoliberal Santiago (2014).
- Marilyn Loden, discussion of the glass ceiling in BBC 100 Women (2017).
- David J. Luke, Redlining, Encyclopedia of Human Services and Diversity (2014).
Part of 730 Hours of Violence, an exhibition by Domestic Data Streamers at Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona, 7–30 September 2021.
This project received funding through the MediaFutures project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951962. The work reflects the authors’ views; the European Commission is not responsible for any use of the information.
