The Llobregat, the City, and the Sea: An Artistic Encounter at Espronceda

By Ellen Finnerty
The Llobregat river is born near Castellar de n’Hug a small mountain village in the Catalan Pyrenees. I hop on a bus about 10km away from this village headed south for Barcelona.

The river too flows south, south of the city where at its mouth it forms the Llobregat delta, an expansion of extraordinarily bio-diverse and fertile land – an area which has been largely paved and urbanised due to the infrastructure built for Barcelona’s international airport. After the delta it flows out into the Mediterranean Sea. I get off my bus in the centre of the city about five hundred metres away from Plaça de Catalunya, legs stiff from sitting and I think of this river, the mountains where it began, its course, our shared trajectory, and I think of the sea, only a couple of kilometres away but hardly palpable in and amongst the tall buildings of the city’s centre. Though I can’t quite sense it I think of it all the same.
The residency was to focus on Marine Ecosystems, specifically Barcelona’s marine ecosystem and the bus journey gave me just enough time to think about how this was a topic that I knew next to nothing about. “I’m a tourist in Barcelona,” I thought, with all the weight of that word in this city, an Irish theatre-maker living in the South of France “who am I to make art about this place, their sea.” And what’s worse, there were four more just like me descending on the city too, each of us coming from our respective habitats, our own corners of the world.
“The residency aims to create an intimate, experimental, collaborative, and transdisciplinary experiential environment” they told us in an email. “We ask you to come in good faith and with an open mind. It will be an experience where you will have to bring your skills into play and build a performance piece together with the other participants.”
So we came, five artists in good faith and with an open mind to the Espronceda Institute of Art and Culture. Marcos Mereles an Argentinian filmmaker based in London, Anita Szymanska a performer and theatre-maker from Poland, Eirini Petraki a performer and opera singer from Greece and Sabine Neilande a Latvian dancer and choreographer. Five artists from different places with a background in a range of disciplines. The creative process was very rich in this way. Each of us had different approaches to making art, different entry points, different ways of visualising things. I felt I could learn from the other artists and that I had space to offer my own insights to the process.
Espronceda welcomed us into their space eked out in an unassuming little cluster of warehouses in the north of the city. The residency was in collaboration with the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM – CSIC) in Barcelona, the art centre La Panera in Leida and the AGI (Art, Globalization, Interculturality) research group of the University of Barcelona. We spoke to artists and scientists and began to get a sense our topic and of the rich creative territory that lies between science and art. Josep Lloret scientist and senior researcher in Institut de Ciències del Mar told us about a cookbook that was being developed to encourage people to cook with less popular fish species in order to tackle over-fishing of more popular kinds. Christian Alonso, Director of La Panera, spoke to us about an exhibition that turned the gases released from plants into audio. The moss was singing.
Inspired, we were then given the time and space to think and play. We danced flamenco inspired choreography – a homage to Carmen Amaya, a flamenco dancer raised on the beaches of Barcelona. We made masks out of nets lent to us by fishing trawlers. Espronceda allowed us to draw on the floor and on the walls. We examined old maps of the city and its coast-line, saw how different the city looked before and after the Olympics. We basked in Barcelona, the Freddy Mercury and Montserrat hit, at their live performances of the song depicting an ever sparkling Montserrat and a very clean-shaven, suited Mercury. We spoke about low-frequency, deep-sea sounds, compared these sounds in polluted and unpolluted waters. We spoke about climate change, rising water levels and the impending upheaval facing coastal habitations. We spoke about myth making and respect for the sea and land and the places we inhabit. We spoke about a sea that has been exploited. A sea that has been worshiped. We walked along the coastline, felt the salty air on our skin. We walked through the streets in Barceloneta and in a library there read about the barracas that once lined the beaches.


We performed in the Gallery space in Espronceda and got to speak to the audience after the performance. We celebrated our new found connections and thanked the team at Espronceda for their support and generosity and for their trust in us.
Sitting on the bus back towards the Pyrenees I thought at the very least I know a little more about Barcelona and it’s coastline.