RA VAL LA PENA [THE RAVAL IS WORTH IT]

Photographic Portraits of the Raval

Exhibition

Exhibition | 06-09.10.2016 | Residence Space

Photography exhibition by a group of young people from the Joan Salvador Gavina Foundation in the Raval neighborhood. The photographs were taken during a workshop organized by the A Bao A Qu Association, with participation from the Foto Colectania Foundation.

The Joan Salvador Gavina Foundation, an association that has been doing social and education work with socially vulnerable children and young people in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood for 37 years, and the Foto Colectania Foundation, a prestigious organization involved in the dissemination of photography and collecting, organized a photography workshop from February to May 2016 that introduced the young people from the Joan Salvador Gavina Youth Center to the world of images in its most personal and social form, by transmitting photography as art, culture and creation.

Created by the A Bao A Qu Association and directed by the photographer Toni Amengual, the workshop was a joint project between social-educational groups and cultural associations with a clear social awareness, with the aim of implicating creators (photographers), young people from the Joan Salvador Gavina foundation, cultural agents in the neighborhood, and students of the city’s photography schools in a project with a triple perspective (cultural, educational, and social) aimed at social transformation.

“The Raval is, no doubt, one of the most unique neighborhoods in Europe for its history, its cultural blending, its vitality and also its complexity. Photographers, writers and visitors have built up a sometimes mythicized vision of this place; some of the people who were born here have also done that, like Joan Colom or Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

When the Joan Salvador Gavina Foundation offered us the possibility of working together, we took the opportunity to suggest that the young people from the neighborhood be in charge of taking the pictures of their surroundings. So the young people who have studied at the Foundation became the photojournalists telling the stories of their neighborhood. In this way, they followed in the footsteps of photographers who argue that you can only portray a reality without falling into stereotypes if you delve into its complexity and become immersed in it.

The work being done by the Foundation in the Raval for the past 37 is the jumping off point for the neighborhood’s young people to learn the essentials of photographic techniques and perspective from the students of the school’s best photography schools and to later select and exhibit their work with support from specialists in visual education.

This original and integratory project was made possible by the experience in the world of education and visual culture on the part of its promoters: the Joan Salvador Gavina Foundation, at the head, Barcelona’s schools of photography, the A Bao A Qu Association, and the Foto Colectania Foundation.”

Pepe Font de Mora, director of the Foto Colectania Foundation

Links

www.colectania.es

www.fgavina.org

www.abaoaqu.org

http://www.fotografiaencurs.org/ca/node/9905