Cascade

All of this was unknown to me - and to other artists of my generation - only 8 years after La Porta dissolved. Even within the economic scarcity this was happening in, I wonder what our experience of the cultural landscape in the city, and our dreams as artists, would have been if we would have been in touch with such an image of alternative cultural richness right in our immediate surroundings.

Realising how this alternative community (and therefore others as well) had been functioning invisibly to the younger generation is, to me, a symptom of the fact that the young generation of emerging artists and the independent, alternative artists who are our immediate predecessors are unfamiliar with each other - for several reasons.

When there is intergenerational ignorance, there is a loss: a whole series of information and knowledge based on strategies, struggles, learnings that cannot be transmitted. The loss is twofold as the new generation cannot learn from the previous generation, and the more experienced generation - who still needs new energies to continue their movement - cannot transmit their information and perpetuate their positions.

Cascades is an audiovisual project that proposes documenting how the artists of the alternative performing arts have worked, resisted and formed an artistic community in Barcelona / Catalonia / Spain in the last 20 years. Through the eyes, bodies and practices of 6 artists, I will experience what the working conditions in the sector during this period of time have been, as well as the strategies the artists have forged to continue working and generating contexts for themselves.

It’s aim is to visibilise a generation of independent artists who built and organized themselves before a younger generation arrived, to understand their struggles (since we are inheriting them), and to transmit this information to younger bodies for the purpose of inspiration, continual imagination and future organisation.