Kinetics of Work. Critical Cartographies of a Contested Sant Andreu. Sant Andreu Contemporani, Barcelona, 2025
EXHIBITION
Kinetics of Work. Critical Cartographies of a Contested Sant Andreu is the result of an artistic mediation process led by Antonella Medici within the framework of the Miquel Casablancas Visual Arts Award, organized by Sant Andreu Contemporani. The exhibition takes the neighborhood of Sant Andreu as its starting point to explore urban transformations and the various tensions currently shaking local communities: gentrification, real estate speculation and displacement, the uberization and precarization of labor, the loss of heritage, and the privatization of communal spaces.
Through artworks co-created with the project’s participants and collaborators, the exhibition maps out a critical and affective counter-cartography that links past struggles with present-day conflicts. Kinetics of Work opens up a space for political imagination, where archives, play, mapping, and cinema intertwine. It is an invitation to walk through Sant Andreu as a living and contested territory, from which to claim the right to inhabit and to imagine alternative futures.
ARTWORK EXHIBITED:
Collective Cartography (2024–2025) synthesizes the process of collective mapping developed during the mediation sessions held in 2024, in which participants shared some of the discomforts affecting the territory: labor precarity, the disappearance of heritage, places associated with urban control and alienation, as well as spaces of resistance, grassroots organization, and community self-management. The expanded publication Kinetics of Work (2024–2025) is transformed into an installation for the purposes of this exhibition. It takes the form of a newspaper constructed from diverse materials: affective maps, historical and current photographs gathered during urban drift walks, documents extracted from online sources, songs, and texts that—through a non-linear structure—narrate the stories of meaningful places in Sant Andreu. From the neighborhood’s former cinemas—many of which have been turned into supermarket chains—to locations like the former Versalles bar, a symbol of real estate speculation, and spaces of resistance such as El Kiosko Tropical in Plaça de les Palmeres, as well as sites of historical memory like the Church of Sant Andreu de Palomar, where the women of Motor Ibérica staged a sit-in in 1976.
The newspaper is accompanied by Volta Sant Andreu (2025), a barometric board game inspired by The Game of the Goose, which brings together two key narratives: the neighborhood’s cycling tradition and the working conditions of today’s riders. In the early 20th century, working-class youths transported film reels by bicycle between cinemas like the Odeón and participated in annual races such as the “Cinematography Cycling Race,” designed to increase productivity. Today, this figure returns in a new form: the rider, governed by algorithms that demand speed and reinforce precarious labor dynamics. This game offers a playful yet critical journey through these continuities of work on wheels.
Finally, the dialectical montage Palimpsest I and II (2025) proposes a poetic and critical reflection on the city as a space of rewriting. Through four short videos showing former cinemas—the Odeón, the Victoria, the Central, and the Recreo—still images coexist with wandering visual and sound archives from diverse geographic and historical contexts. Voiceovers from other territories (Mexico and Los Angeles) evoke expropriations, working-class memories, and resistance narratives that resonate with the changing landscape of Sant Andreu. This piece explores the concept of the palimpsest as a metaphor for the city: a reused surface where past imprints endure beneath the layers of the present.
CREDITS:
Research, mediation, and curatorship: Antonella Medici
Participants: Gerardo Masanti, Pau Vinyes, Àlex Mamberto, Sílvia Mercè i Sonet, Albert Cunill, Felipe Corredor, Héctor Pasten, A.V, Laura Eccher, Erick Beltrán, Oriana Medici, Tim Rudolph, Diana Padrón, Óscar Helbing, Mathilde Vignaud
Collaborators: Lumbung Press, Centre d’Estudis Ignasi Iglésias, Mensakas, Riders x Derechos, Sonder Teatre, Centre Cívic Sant Andreu
Organized by: Sant Andreu Contemporani, Barcelona City Council – Sant Andreu District
Acknowledgements: Nuria Soto, Juan de Andrés Arias, Espectros de lo Urbano, Gerard Ortín, Fabra i Coats Centre d’Art Contemporani, Anabel García Ramón, Júlia Nueno, José Luís Vicente, Sant Andreu de Cap a Peus
Exhibition: Kinetics of Work. Critical Cartographies of a Contested Sant Andreu
Dates: May 15 – June 25
Venue: Centre Cívic Sant Andreu, Barcelona
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