SPECIAL REPORT: art & trends from Barcelona š¦ā½šļø
A look at the buzzy Spanish city from within, via a recent art fair ā along with some upcoming items of interest!!
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Really quickly, before we get into our annual Barcelona city trends story, an update on the next in the How To Be Creativeā¢: Conversations series.
Save the date for October 23, as music critic and writer Philip Sherburne of Futurism Restated will be joining me for a talk on music writing and criticism. For those unfamiliar, Philip is a music journalist and critic who has contributed to Pitchfork, Resident Advisor, Wire, Mixmag, and more venues at the intersection of contemporary, experimental music and innovative electronic/dance music. Philip is known for his reviews for Pitchfork, thinkpieces like musing on the state of dance music, and profiles on figures from Panda Bear to RosalĆa. His newsletter Futurism Restated is a go-to for the most interesting music of the moment, along with the label he co-runs, Balmat. If youāre a writer or musician who wants to write about this world, a music fan hoping to think more critically about music, or someone who hopes to talk about music in better ways, I highly encourage you to attend. Itās free too!! And I see it as a sequel to this conversation I had with Philip last summer, which is a personal favorite story. Iād love to see you there: learn more and RSVP here.
If you missed the last chat with Max Berlinger, I got you: catch the video of our talk here. It was fantastic! And offers an idea of what to expect too, as the chat takes place in a lil video call where people can ask questions and share thoughts in real time (versus the more impersonal ālive videoā).
Nowā¦back to regular, local trend reporting š¤
Iāve lived in Barcelona for three years, which has been an incredible and disorienting time, as the immigrant experience continues to challenge and reward this American, in ways that make me see the opportunity of living life fully but also enables an intertwined depression and frustration based in the myriad coulda-shoulda-wouldas of said life as it relates to geolocal opportunities. Which is all to say: Iām going to do my best to be impartial and culturally analytical versus centering my own woes. Cāest la vie!!!!!!
This is the second year Iāve done such a story, as it aligns with an annual contemporary art fair called SWAB that posits the cultural promise of the city. Iām also writing this as Iām not planning on going anywhere until the holidays, as I will be ā Surprise! ā in Los Angeles from mid-December through mid-January, before heading to NYC for the last two weeks of the month. Iāll be there to see family and friends and ā Ideally! ā take lots of meeting with whomever is interested, to pitch Trend Reportā¢ products like specialized TR.BIZ dispatches along with advertising, writing and cultural analyzing opportunities, and landing potential speaking engagements, as these will be a big 2026 push. Again: Iām trying to get this newsletter to pay off! Soā¦if any of that is of interest or you have any intel, drop me a line and letās see what we can do. There will also be a TRL and a few social meetups too!!!!!!! Iād love to meet my Angeleno and New Yorker crew <3
SWAB took place this past weekend, which fell at its typical time amidst an abnormal world. The Palestine flotilla disembarked from Barcelona, leaving the city in an anxious wait for what would happen to the locals aboard along with the various international public figures there too. We all know what happened, which wasnāt exactly a surprise but was distressing nonetheless. As demonstrators marched down GracĆa on Saturday, as I heard helicopters and police loudspeakers from my apartment, I realized what was happening ā and that I was in my apartment writing about god damned trends instead of being out in the world, knowledgeable of such happenings and participating in something more urgent than the hehes and hahas seen on the small screen.
That was the mindset of entering the fair, which was a bit disorienting to behold: it was the smallest entry of the three fairs Iāve attended, feeling as if the number of galleries present this year was half the year before. It was mid-afternoon Saturday in the second biggest city in Spain, seemingly the only contemporary art fair in the city ā and it was remarkably vacant. Maybe it was the timing, that we were late to the party, or maybe it was the protests that drew away the otherwise interested. That didnāt explain the small size though, how demure the affair was.
The work was fine too, as galleries from Barcelona and the larger Iberian peninsula held the greatest presence along with galleries from Mexico City and London, Seoul and Oslo. Some themes were placed upon those showing by SWAB, like ideas of the āpolar and tropicā along with linking local galleries with emerging LATAM talents ā but the overall feeling was that of decay, of decomposition. I kept noticing detached body parts as in Tef Nakielsky and Felipe GarcĆa Salazarās Ephemeral at R.A.R.O., which felt like Saw via Pompeii via the techno-panoptic reality of small cameras watching these stilled body parts scattered around the floor, along the walls. El(ena) Hoskyns-Abrahall at SHAM offered a gym bag calcified, a crystalized artifact from now that was brought back from the future to reveal damages. Paintings made from ceramic tiles with silver ants, a shirt made of wax: the future is now and now is not-right. Repeated paintings felt like fingers pawing at canvases, clawing to get out of this moment via pretty spots on dirty surfaces or the aluminum hull of a closed laptop: Marta MarcĆ©ās Is it all you at Palmadotze, Ilia Balavadze at weseeitems, Martina RodrĆguez MorĆ”n at Tha House ā all beautiful, smudging life in straightforward and unknown ways, all suggesting the tangled of life, or simply beauty in the simplest expression of people making art. Finger paint to pass these fascistic times, I suppose.
There was the feeling of science fiction and monster making too, that weāve moved beyond works made with and through technology (Although those existed, namely Arthur Hoffmanās metallic paintings at a-toposā.) and into the space of snarling screens and creatures emerging from and through us. a66ās inclusion of Camile Theodotās war paintings, of dogs and knights clattering in metallic grays, manifested these collisions well, as Andrzej Staniek at Galeria Szczur pinned ghouls to flattened disco balls so that you could see yourself as a monster set against them. Abbozzo Galleryās presentation of Jake Santos brought the idea together with blurring portraits of tragic beauties, clowns disassociating amidst their twinkles and hypothermic sirens with blue skin, everything lost in the idea of death or firmly in the after. The monsters could be us too, as many a work was about disconnection and persons at a distance: Tenthaus featuring images of groups being baptized in blood; Lena Laguna Dielās paintings at MalpaĆs of couples across from each other, not looking at each other, sometimes just silhouettes of light; Vortex from AFTERpoema and Anywhere, where a plant controlled a pen, scribbling on a surface, seeking to communicate but never quite getting there, an act that felt like a modern creative trope of transmuting life from the silent among us.
Even as Lumbung Space presented various art posters by artists, with many statements on freeing Palestine and seeking justice, there was the collective feeling of deflation, of patheticism. What is the point of this in these times? Ecological disaster, global political unrest, artificial intelligence coming for every aspect of humanity: these are deeply dehumanizing times and, yet, we are here painting pictures. What is the worth of such expressions in these times? Have always always felt such nihilism or is that unique to now? It was a feeling I was working through that day, which felt very much of-a-kind walking the sunken floors of SWAB, considering the state of art worldwide but also the local potential cracking under my feet. The uselessness, the meaninglessness, the worthlessness. Shall we continue playing our violins as the ship goes down? Or is there an import beyond our own mental health? Artists seem to be as confused as ever, symbiotes of a crashing system wondering if it was all worth it.
Now what we came here for: trends and general thoughts on the city, along with recommendations. Take all of this with lots of salt, as I am a local but also an immigrant, meaning: Iām āin itā but also at a distance from a lot of the culture.
First, the big brain analysis, the Bartrendlronasā¢
An annoyance that I think is important context: the city is in-an-echo, meaning that certain styles and certain cultural ephemera take a bit of time to hit here. Labubu was the rare exception but, despite clocking Trader Joeās back way back in Paris in the spring, I did not see one here until late September despite seeing them in London and Copenhagen and Stockholm well before then. That gives you an idea of the echoplex, not to say such macro-cultural expressions didnāt exist then but that they werenāt āas seen.ā Another example? Natural wine, ironic as literally every other country in the world is obsessed with natural wines from Catalunya and the larger Barcelona area: it wasnāt until this summer that natural wine spots seemed to multiply ā and, even then, theyāre very much āoutsideā of the culture. Iāll share a few faves in the recommendations section, but this has been a bee in my bonnet since I got here in 2022, as it felt like travelling back to 2015 LA, a year or two before Jill of Domaine LA reshaped the cityās wine palate. To see the future only to travel back in time is always a souring experience.
Restaurants are obsessed with a 1980s and 1990s NYC vibe, meaning metallic interiors and string lights, mirrors and rounded woods, suggest upscale American Psycho qualities that post-hipster Gen Z Catalans are obsessing over. Itās not not a cool style, but itās very much of-a-kind as you see it from Mesa Lobo to Fugaz to Clara, suggesting that maximalism in design is actually more Millennial (Casa Fiero, for example.) as such design effervescence feels much more cozier and inviting ā and older, as in not trying to play-to-trends as the younger places do.
To this: the chrome trend is still going very strong in these parts. I donāt hate chrome plates and chrome coupes and chrome walls and chrome counters: I donāt! But they are so ubiquitous here, to the point that itās starting to feel like every restaurant is also an industrial kitchen. Itās wearing thin!
If the restaurants donāt look like the above, they resemble something akin to Great White in Los Angeles: stucco walls, tropical-adjacent plants, everything ovular and rounded, and giant āstatementā artworks on the wall that were likely made by someone on staff. The difference is that some places trend toward the cave-like versus the warm, cozy, Australian vibes which is to say that an interior design game of telephone was played to get us where we are here. I call it La Papacore, as the overly trendy brunch spot La Papa popularized it. More on places like La Papa in a moment.
If thereās one āstyleā that seems to be ground zero here, itās the Gimaguas/Paloma Wool girl. Think longer shorts, think cute tiny polo shirts, think mary janes and kitten heels, think grommet bags and anything studded: thatās the (Lady!) style here, which is broken up by columnal dresses, linen (White!) pants, and the Adidas shorts ālookā which is generally everywhere. The longer the hair, the better too (which Cris shared thoughts on not too long ago).
Another item, related and not, is that the vest-as-shirt trend is going wild in these parts, as it has become a local answer to something between a tank top and a dress shirt, a business casual look that is as cute as it is popular.
