Celebrating La Escocesa

This September La Escocesa celebrated its 20th anniversary, and it did so by opening its doors to the public with more than 20 activities for children and adults. Rebobinart wanted to take part too, which is why we created a model of artistic activation with several actions that give visibility and continuity to La Escocesa’s historic role as a leading centre for the production and dissemination of artistic and cultural projects in the city of Barcelona.

La Escocesa opened its doors in 1999 in a former textile factory in Poblenou. The layout of the space, surrounded by large-format walls, attracted a great many street artists, who found in La Escocesa a place to create and develop their work. That is why La Escocesa, as well as being a meeting point for artists from many disciplines, is also a leading creative centre for street art.

In 2006 the new civic-behaviour by-law came into force and, as a result, painting large-format murals in the city of Barcelona became completely forbidden. It was then that La Escocesa opened an alternative route around the legal restrictions the city’s street artists were running into. Making use of the factory buildings, resident artists — who at the time were already painting large murals in cities around the world — and visiting artists began to paint some of its walls to reclaim the freedom to create murals.

In 2012 the street artist Zosen, with the help of other resident artists, organised a gathering of local and international muralists at La Escocesa with the aim of stimulating street art in Barcelona. Over a few days, artists painted the walls of the factory buildings, and round tables and documentary screenings about this artistic discipline were organised as well. After the success of its first edition, the Mural Festival established itself as an oasis for street art in Barcelona, becoming a meeting point for muralists from all over the world. During the five years the festival ran, artists from Japan, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Belgium, Italy, England, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain passed through the walls of La Escocesa.

The festival has not been held for some years now, which is why Rebobinart wanted to remember it on the occasion of La Escocesa’s twentieth anniversary. Taking advantage of these open days, the artist Zosen created a large-scale intervention on one of the outer walls of the old factory. We also organised a photographic exhibition illustrating the history of the mural festival. In this way we not only paid tribute to La Escocesa’s role as a leading space for the creation and production of visual arts and street art, but also gave new visitors the chance to discover the history of the centre.

We can therefore say that the goal of making La Escocesa’s work widely known — in the visual arts in general and, more specifically, in establishing mural art as an artistic discipline — was achieved, and that would not have been possible without the support of Philarthropic and Meridia Capital. At Rebobinart we hope that, in the not-too-distant future, artists will once again be able to intervene on the walls of La Escocesa and so revive one of the centre’s traditions.