“We have forgotten that we do not live in our bodies, but that we are bodily constitutions in ourselves,” said the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa in his treatise The Thinking Hand. The same words, the same sentence resounded this morning among the pillars – lived, understood by the BAAS architectural studio – of the Barcelona History Museum (MUHBA). They were pronounced by the Mataronine dancer Anna Serra in one of the festive proposals of the inaugural event of the Festes d’Aquitectura 2024, organized one more year by the Col legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC).
The sensory dance workshop invited the public to be guided by Serra in a collective movement in pursuit of establishing a dialogue with the building, understanding dialogue as that invitation to discover the historical building by touching it, dancing with it and recognizing that the space has a voice. Another group of attendees was dedicated to capturing the celebration event on a sheet of paper as part of another of the activities of the Oliva Artés urban laboratory.
The Festes d’Arquitectura were born from the initiative to highlight a specific space or building in each district of the city through experimentation and awareness. This year, the inauguration by the president of the Barcelona Demarcation of the COAC Sandra Bestraten wanted to highlight “the link between people and building”, in order to realize “the importance of architecture in our way of understanding ourselves and “feel with the city.”
To underline the speech and fill it with a claim for the conservation of industrial heritage, Bestraten has had the collaboration of Anna Serra who, in her sensory dance proposal, invites attendees to caress the building, feel its textures, reliefs and exercise a collective dance appearance to a waltz between person and building. Highlighting the importance of urban laboratories as spaces for experimentation and discovery, Bestarten joined the dance defined by Serra as “an invitation to live our body as a home, an exercise in removing pillars and understanding our environment as an extension of the body.” highlighting that friendly architecture that awakens our senses and forges our identity.
By activating the “peripheral gaze that understands environment and life as conjugated terms” in Serra’s words, one can understand the objective behind the patina of the inaugural activity: the importance of knowing those factory spaces of the city, giving them a voice through dialogue and giving them back to the city and its citizens. The event concluded with a snack outside the MUHBA while inside, between the pillars of our sentimental architecture, a murmur of life of freed edges and friendly arches continued to dance.
