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Looking at the Raval

The Raval is one of the areas of Barcelona where the most varied social and cultural realities meet and coexist. It is also a part of the city that has suffered most urbanistic and economic transformations in recent years. If we want to know what Barcelona is like and what educational, cultural and socio-economic challenges it faces, we have to look at this neighbourhood and understand it. This list offers a selection of views of the Raval through the eyes of a series of authors who have passed through the CCCB to explain their view of a district that is both a mirror and an example of Barcelona.

Raval

Soy Cámara online

This episode, directed by Óscar Pérez, director and producer of El sastre (The tailor) among other documentary works, is made entirely in the Raval district of Barcelona. The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona recovers the essence of its geographical location. The dire...

Lydia Cacho, Lilian Thuram, Kamila Shamsie and Pankaj Mishra

Talks in the Raval Colleges

The CCCB is programming a series of talks, with a high cultural content, in the Raval district High Schools. The speakers are internationally renowned figures who raise current issues of our society with an impact on young people. Participants include Mexican journalist and human rights defender ...

Interview with Teju Cole: Filming the Raval

Writer and photographer

Writer, photographer and art historian. Throughout his career he has combined literature with photography, art criticism and exhibition curatorship. He grew up in Nigeria and in 1992 settled in the United States. He debuted in 2007 with his novella Every Day is for the Thief, ...

Who is looking at us?

Soy Cámara online

Every August afternoon, Filipino kids meet in an alleyway behind the CCCB. Why here rather than anywhere else? It’s very simple: the Centre’s generous plate glass allows them to practise their choreographies and watch their reflections. Jade, a 13-year-old girl, shows the rest of ...

From my Balcony: Public Space – Routines, Plurality and Democracy

Soy Cámara online

This programme is set on a balcony in the Raval of Barcelona, a prime observatory of the major transformations that this district underwent between 1996 and 2009. There, before us, the frenetic life of the neighbourhood unfolds, with scenes featuring local residents and passers-by who appropriate ...

We are in the Raval

Documentary

The documentary “Som del Raval” (We’re from the Raval) is the product of collaboration between Àngela Bosch, set designer and video and theatre workshop facilitator, and the Miquel Tarradell Institute. Both have received the technical and human support of the CCCB. ...

Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Sergi Doria: A literary Raval.

The fictions of memory

Conversation between Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Sergi Doria about the city imagery that inspired some of passages of the novel The Shadow of the Wind (2001), readings set in old Barcelona and a legendary nomenclature: District V, barrio Chino, Raval... Part of the program of the ...

Zygmunt Bauman

New Borders and Universal Values

What sort of differences are becoming important because of the borders we are drawing today? Bauman talks about our obsession with borders, and exemplifies it with the problems in the city, since the city is a big laboratory of experiments in cohabitation, human understanding and dialogue

Kamila Shamsie

Open city. The Unmapped City

In 1947, at the Partition of India and Pakistan, Karachi lost half its population and yet doubled in size as refugees/migrants crossed the new border in two directions. The consequence was a city made new overnight, with no urban planning in place to contend with this. Over the decades the ...

Oriol Bohigas, Itziar González and J. Martí Gómez.

Raval: an Urban Laboratory

Dialogue between Itziar González, architect and former Barcelona City councillor for Ciutat Vella, and Oriol Bohigas, architect, moderated by the journalist Josep Martí Gómez on the occasion of the inauguration of the CCCB ARCHIVE—City and Public Space. This public consultation fund of the CCCB is expanded by over 2,000 new multimedia references dealing with the contemporary city: exhibitions, debates and conferences, audiovisuals, photographic and bibliographic collections. ...

Consuelo Bautista, Itziar González i Xavier Theros

Rava

Debate about the Raval neighbourhood with Consuelo Bautista, Itziar González and Xavier Theros Presentation of the book Raval by Consuelo Bautista, a Colombian photographer resident in Barcelona who portrays the old “Barrio Chino” in black and white.  

Temps de caritat (Times of Charity)

Documentary

The documentary is structured across five days, five Thursdays serving to evoke the childhood of men and women who lived at the Casa de Caritat almshouse in Barcelona (a building that is today home to the CCCB), offering a living testimony of their childhood and adolescence. In some parts, ...