Roc Blackblock and Miquel Wert execute the largest mural work in the history of Rebobinart
In the video, how the mural at the new Sant Andreu station was painted: 3,000 square metres, days running from seven in the morning to six in the evening, and a style guide with a colour code drawn up before starting. The main wall carries eleven key moments in the history of the railway, with a veiled tribute to the trades — engineers, draughtsmen, illustrators.
Video transcript (translated from Catalan)3 min 54 s
The working method was to meet at seven in the morning at the hut up top, go down while it was still dark, down to the platform, and personally I didn't leave here, as it were, until six in the evening.
By the time we came in here we had been working for many weeks, trying to devise a working method. We developed what amounts to a style guide in which we had set out all the information, written a whole colour code, a whole working method to try to cover 3,000 square metres of surface.
Standing in front of a 3,000-square-metre wall is a complex thing because of what it represents, because of this almost panoramic succession of episodes we have introduced. This project brings together two lines of work we have been pursuing: one, access to building sites while a building is going up, and on the other hand railway lines.
What the viewer, the traveller, will find at this station is basically two walls. There is one wall we could call the main one, where we highlight eleven key moments in the history of the railway here, but always with an eye and a nod to the Sant Andreu neighbourhood we are in. We also wanted to pay a perhaps more veiled tribute to the whole tradition, to all the trades tied to the railway: to the engineers, the draughtsmen, the illustrators. What that succession of tickets tries to evoke is that history in a secondary, subtler way, setting out something of the evolution of the designs, the papers, the colours.
That is to say, we wanted this Sant Andreu station to have walls that speak, that have a soul, that enthuse railway users and make this station feel very close to the people of Sant Andreu — a station that is thoroughly of Sant Andreu, and of Barcelona. We wanted to make a station that moves you.
In the end, the last word on this work will belong to each of the station's users, and it will take shape as time goes by: we shall see how it ages and how it stands up to the passage of history.
Video transcript, edited for reading: repetitions and verbal fillers have been removed, the text has been punctuated and speakers are identified.
Video: Marta Romero Coll
Barcelona
12.12.2022
Under the title “Making track, making life”, the internationally renowned artists Miquel Wert and Roc Blackblockhave signed the largest mural work in the history of Rebobinart and the largest representation of urban art in a railway station in Spain.
Throughout more than 3,100m2 of the new Sant Andreu station in Barcelona, the artists have worked together on a chronology of the history of the railway in Catalonia and in the Barcelona neighbourhood where it is located, as well as a review of the evolution of more sustainable mobility.
Of the total surface area, 1.329m2 are on the mountain side where trains enter from Montcada and head towards Barcelona; and 1.784m2 are next to the sea where trains leave in the opposite direction, from the different stations in Barcelona towards Montcada.
Both sides of the monumental mural transport users to an art gallery where they can enjoy a unique and educational experience along the platform of a railway station. The journey from the most imposing past to the present day, with the representation of an image of the workers who built Sant Andreu station itself, pays tribute to all the hands that have been part of this history.
To carry out this choral work between Roc Blackblock and Miquel Wert, both artists have worked side by side for months, before entering the station, to coordinate the design of the two walls and divide up the different figures that fill them. In addition, Blackblock and Wert have had to document themselves and have had to search through the railway archives of Catalonia to find the most appropriate images for the infrastructure.
Both artists have emphasised throughout the process that it is a team effort between them and the support staff of Rebobinart, with whom they have been supported at all times to achieve full days painting in a station still under construction and, therefore, in coexistence with other construction companies and installation of services.
Miquel Wert is a painter with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona (2005). His works and walls can be found internationally in different solo and group exhibitions since 2000. He has been awarded the “LIV International Drawing Prize Ynglada-Guillot 2016”, the honourable mention in the exhibition “Stipendutstilling” in Oslo and the residencies of “Círculo Artístico de San Lucas”, “Torrearte” and “Jiser: Mediterranean Reflections”.
Roc Blackblock studied Graphic Design at the Elisava School in Barcelona and Illustration at the Serra y Abella Art School in Hospitalet de Llobregat. At the end of the 90s, he began his career as an illustrator and tattoo artist, and it was in this environment that he became interested in graffiti as a means of collective communication. Roc makes his creativity available to the community as a loudspeaker for historical memory and social demands. His work is therefore a meeting point between urban art and social struggle.
