The art studio where I walk my dog and buy beetroot
I know a place where it seems like all of Barcelona comes together, from cricket players to cane-toting grandfathers. It’s the art of the city.
We live a short walk from a massive art studio. There’s no sign on the door, nor even a door, but you can see it for yourself. I pass it many times a week, and there is almost always someone working, someone creating, someone playing.
Some mornings, troops of students arrive to make art. Together they prep a giant canvas and together — a half dozen hands in unison — they turn it from blank into beauty. Other times there’s a camera crew, or a single digital eye on a tripod, capturing the artist’s creation in process. Often it’s just a solo practitioner, spray can in hand, focused on their craft, back to the world.
The art studio is also a skatepark. In the evenings, skateboarders glide to and fro, clothing billowing. On weekends, sometimes others follow them with cameras. Occasionally large trucks park in the driveway, set up snack tables for the crew, unload a fortune in camera equipment and commence to film.
The art studio is also a dog park. There’s always a canine or two rushing around to sniff the art, with humans in tow. There’s a man who seems to come every morning with two dogs, one of which looks like an overgrown sibling of our four-legged child, Clyde.
The art studio is also a farmer’s market. Every Saturday, tables and awnings spring up all over, selling freshly baked bread, still-soiled produce, hot coffee from a bicycle stand. There’s a DJ most days and a woman offering kimchi and sauces below a short noren curtain. Early in the year, you can buy a ticket for a calcotada — a barbecue featuring grilled green onions in a romesco sauce — and sit down to eat it right there in the market. The whole thing is organized by a local slow food association, so take your time.
In the summer, the art studio becomes still more things. A concert hall: the concrete sprouts speakers and a stage and kegs, and pounding music commences for a multi-day neighborhood celebration. An evening bar: a tiny shed I hadn’t thought twice about recently started serving vermouth and cerveza. A cricket ground: I’ve had to cross through its grounds more carefully in recent months, to neither disrupt proceedings nor get brained by a ball.
In other words, the art studio is anything but a graffiti-tagged abandoned lot. Yes, a pair of skeletal structures tower over visitors, nets stretched across their unfinished bones. Yes, there are three towering brick chimneys, from a power plant shuttered more than three decades ago, that give the space its name: Les Tres Xemeneies, in Catalan. But this space has not been abandoned, it has been reclaimed.




Anyone can paint the concrete walls. Dogs and skateboards and walker-pushing retirees coexist. You can buy carrots here and possibly cannabis too. You can learn to ride a bike here, and I’ve seen a few do just that. You could call it a park: there are picnic benches, ping-pong tables, bocce courts and a rarely-used dog run (they prefer to run around everywhere else). But it is so much more than most parks.
It’s a shame there are unfinished buildings in a choice location in a city where many residents find the rents rising out of their reach. You can see this too, as it is also a home, where you can find sleepers in tents and on benches most mornings. So hopefully the empty shells will be filled. For a park that already holds so much, several stories of residents would fit right in.
To me, the site is a reminder of how our urban spaces, if we choose, if we put the work in, if we embrace our multidimensional communities, can be many things to many people. When we let zoning restrictions or short-sighted self-interested complaints block such co-locations of joy and creativity, we never even see how much we lose. All that humanity bumping up against each other — the loose-limbed kids swinging cricket bats and the hipsters spraying walls and the old-timers sipping Estrella — makes us all richer. That’s the art of the city, you see.
drop | Enjoy a local space. Set up a canvas. Toss a frisbee. Pack a picnic. Jump on a skateboard. Bring your dog. Invite your other loved ones, too.
ripple | Work with neighbors. Attend a local group’s meetings. I’m across the ocean from my hometown, but I recently came across Petaluma Urban Chat.
wave | Push for change. Join a regional group, like Bay Area’s SPUR. I just did.
I want to followup these dispatches with actions, not more reading. But I’m new to this, and I’m figuring it out as I go. Involved in something cool? Let me know.
The Barcelona Inside Me | excerpt
I think I’ll move into Gaudí’s dream
of recycled mesh, walk barefoot
on his flagstone tiles
inscribed with seaweed
and sacred graffiti
from pagan tombs.
O, Barcelona of chamfered corners!
Read in full at poets.org.
Know someone who might like this? Pass it along. And invite them to the park, too.
This issue was a collective effort. Thanks to my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate, and my proofreader, Steve Kay. Any errors, of grammar or judgment, are mine alone.