La exposición terminará el 20.6.2024

Pastinsky

With this exhibition, we become acquainted with the story of Margarita and that of her father Joaquín, and we also discover Pastinsky, Joaquín’s artistic alter ego. We uncover Margarita’s narrative, a descendant of a bourgeois family that lived for several generations in a huge apartment, and who is forced to leave it due to the increase in rent.

Immersing oneself in the home of Margarita’s family, a common yet special apartment in the heart of Barcelona’s Eixample, is a unique experience. Josep Maria de Llobet guides us through every room and corner, tracing the passage of time from the day Joaquín turned 78 and Pastinsky was born. During this journey, we experience the final days, the last hours, the moment of moving out, that earthly limbo to which banks and the economy have led us, but for which they do not offer an easy way out.

Through this great work, Josep Maria speaks to us about the housing crisis, a problem that many cities have been suffering from for a long time and which is hitting Barcelona very hard; the “gentrification 2.0”, the invisible evictions. The novelty is that now it is not only the most disadvantaged classes that are forced to move, nor does it only affect the most depressed neighborhoods.

For Belgrade Photo Book Week, it is a genuine honor and pleasure to be able to include a work of the quality and relevance of “Pastinsky” in our program. Josep Maria de Llobet has accepted the challenge of bringing his work from paper to exhibition format for the first time, here in our city, at the Instituto Cervantes de Belgrado.

Josep Maria de Llobet was born in 1973 in Barcelona, where he resides. Graduated from the Faculty of Law at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, he combined his university studies with photography studies at the Institut d’Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya (IEFC), of which he has been the director since 2023. He also collaborates with the university by teaching photography workshops at various architecture schools, such as Barcelona or the IASAP-BV program at the University of Illinois. His work is part of public and private collections, including the Art Collection of Banc Sabadell, the National Photography Collection of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and the Library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work aims to generate documents using tools of artistic language, which serve him to reflect on social reality from a contemporary perspective. His field of action is the urban territory, and he uses photographic imagery as material for visual reconstruction of his environment. He has carried out photographic installations in emblematic spaces such as the Modelo Prison in Barcelona, and exhibited in festivals such as DOCfield or Revela-T and in different galleries. He has been published in national and international media and has participated as a jury member in various photographic competitions. He has also been invited as a speaker at conferences and festivals. His beginnings as a professional photographer are linked to advertising, although his interest in architectural space and urban territory has led him to collaborate more and more regularly with architecture and urbanism studios, museums, and public and private institutions. He is a member of the association Photographic Social Vision and co-founder and editor at the independent publishing house specializing in photobooks, Ediciones Posibles.

https://www.dellobet.com/
https://www.instagram.com/jm_dellobet/

These photos were taken in Barcelona during the year 2014.

The works in this exhibition are collected in the book Pastinsky, published by Ediciones Posibles.

https://www.edicionesposibles.com/

This project is supported by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)