Barcelona

Barcelona is a collection of 40 photographs, produced from an exploration of Les Roquetes and Trinitat Nova, two outlying neighbourhoods of the Nou Barris area of Barcelona, as part of a council commission to develop a better understanding of the lives and urban environments of their inhabitants. Ribas was one of eleven artists commissioned by Barcelona City Council to document sixteen low-income neighbourhoods in the city between July and December of 2018 as part of the project ‘Setze barris. Mil ciutats, Fotografies per altres relats de Barcelona’.

Ribas’ photographic research is built on a career-long experimentation with representing the city through photography, contextualised in relation to Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' as a materialised memory, a socialised subjectivity, and an embodied system of dispositions. The work interrogates the portrayal of the body in urban space, experimenting with scale and placement, photographing inhabitants glimpsed in daily activities and with a palpable relationship to the objects that surround them. It contributes to a decentring of the archive through the representation of these rarely-portrayed neighbourhoods and the exploration of inclusive and participatory modes, in contrast to established, official visual archives. Testing photography in a broader, visual-ethnographic practice, Ribas discussed residents’ histories with them and recorded interviews were placed alongside the photographs in the city's photographic archive. Incorporating local voices, Ribas worked counter to traditional or 'extractive' representations of marginalised communities.

The completed commissions for all sixteen neighbourhoods were first exhibited in a disused municipal building, El Borsí, in February 2019. They were also displayed in their respective neighbourhoods Casal de Barri, Trinitat Nova (2019) Centre Ton i Guida, Les Roquetes (2020) and are now housed at the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona.