TED x Gràcia
Barcelona
10.11.2015
In November 2015, Rebobinart’s founder, Marc Garcia, gave a talk at TEDxGràcia, the independently organised TED event in the Gràcia neighbourhood. The black-and-white photo shows the speakers sitting on the floor, laughing, during the rehearsal session before the event.
He explained how Rebobinart turned a problem, shop shutters painted without permission, into a way of working: walls given over with consent, artists and neighbours at the same table. The whole journey, from Persianes Lliures to today, is in Rebobinart’s projects.
In the video, Marc Garcia's TEDx talk. It begins with the prawns at his parents' house and the children who kicked a ball at his window, and arrives at the two ways society solves problems: passing them on to someone else or banning them. In between, the mural painted with the inmates of a prison, which ended in a surprise: they could not go back because the inmates did not want their wall repainted.
Video transcript (translated from Spanish)8 min 2 s
Marc GarciaThe biggest conflict in my parents' house is prawns. Prawns are the most coveted food in my family, above all by me. I have a gift for peeling them: I'm very fast, and that lets me eat more prawns than everyone else. Sometimes that leads to small squabbles about how many each of us has had. In the end we take it as a joke: we all know that if my parents eat all the prawns nothing will happen. Well, yes: we'll have a good laugh.
In family settings, where there is a good relationship between everyone, solving problems is much easier. But we all know that when we open the front door and step into the wonderful world of public space, things get a little more complicated.
A few years ago I lived in a Barcelona neighbourhood where the children had a tradition: every Sunday they gathered in front of my house and played ball. The object of the game was to hit my window as many times as possible. On an ordinary Sunday that's fine; but on a hungover Sunday, the thuds sounded twice as loud inside my head.
At the time I worked as a Chupa Chups sales rep and one day, tired of all the thudding, I decided to tackle the problem. I threw sweets to the children and told them that if they stopped playing at my window and started playing at the neighbour's, I would keep throwing them sweets until I ran out. From that day on, my neighbourhood called me Kojak, which was Chupa Chups' competitor.
I learnt three things from that. That if you throw sweets to one child, within a minute twenty appear. That having a nickname integrates you far better into the community. And that, although I earned the nickname Kojak, I hadn't actually solved the problem: I wouldn't be woken by a football on Sundays any more, but my neighbour would.
This is a very common way our society solves problems: taking our problem and passing it on to someone else without solving it. There is another very common way: banning it, believing that a restrictive measure will eliminate or solve the problem.
This is how the city of Barcelona has tried to solve the graffiti problem. In 2006 a regulation came in, the civic bylaw, which among many other things banned painting in the street. That did not solve the graffiti problem; on the contrary, it encouraged this art, but in its most invasive form.
And that is when I appeared in this world of urban art, through my brother, Pau. At the time Pau was painting graffiti in Barcelona and collecting a great many fines and night-time chases. It was then that together we started to think about how we could confront this problem and solve it the same way we solve the prawn problem at my parents' house.
We started looking for spaces around Barcelona where painting legally would be possible, and designing projects that would raise the artistic quality of the work. At the time the council wasn't very keen, wasn't very willing to talk to us, and our projects weren't legal under the urban landscape regulations. But we kept insisting: we did more and more projects and started getting media coverage.
And in the end, this game of playing with the good and the bad of a city's regulations, in 2009 it took us to prison. We went to prison to make a participatory mural, with urban artists and with the inmates themselves. The idea was to decorate that grey space the prison was.
The first ideas the inmates proposed were pistols, knives and protest slogans. This is where we had to step in and tell them we wanted to decorate the prison in a positive colour, something other than grey, and with a message for everyone, since everyone lived there. The earlier ideas weren't much help.
Once we had agreed, we got to work, and within minutes you couldn't tell the artists from the inmates, because we were all working on the same project. Hours passed and an alarm sounded throughout the prison. We looked at the inmates. «Riot», one of them told us. At that moment every prison film we had ever seen flashed before us. We looked at them again: they were laughing. It was lunchtime. That was the moment we really became one, because they let us inside their circle.
Months later we wanted to repeat the experience and go back to the prison. We rang the governor and he told us we couldn't. We couldn't go back because the inmates did not want the same wall repainted. We had managed to make them feel that the wall depriving them of their freedom was theirs: it was no longer the prison's wall, it was the inmates' wall.
We learnt two very important things from that: that when people work on a particular space, they can come to feel it is theirs; and that when they work in groups, a sense of community is generated.
Now, together with the council, we have been set a challenge. There is a very central square in Barcelona where there are two groups of children: one plays football and the other plays cricket. The conflict arises when the two groups argue over the use of the square. We have thought of making an artistic design on the ground and having these two groups work on it together. We are not very interested in the final result: we are interested in the creative process, because that is where the solution lies.
On the one hand we will get these children out of their comfort zone, which is sport; on the other, we will have them work together on a shared project. And that way, as happened in prison, we hope they will stop seeing the square as a space of argument and that it will become a space of union: it is through the creative process that we will have created a shared story for them.
When we started playing around with urban art we had no goal and no objective. It was play, to see what the council would say. It is only now that we see we have a very powerful tool, one that helps us reach many more people and that, through participatory processes, can make everyone feel the city is more their own.
Our idea is to take art out of galleries and museums, and to have this grey, monotonous space that is public space motivate and inspire us. And in the end we have managed it: we are solving problems in public space the same way my parents and I laugh about my skill at peeling prawns.
And now, when you leave the auditorium, I invite you to share a plate of prawns with me, and to start lifting your eyes and seeing the biggest gallery in the world: the street.
Video by TEDx Talks. Video transcript, edited for reading: repetitions and verbal fillers have been removed, the text has been punctuated and speakers are identified.
