Private life, still life

My mother often says that, when she first entered our family apartment on Rambla de Catalunya, she was amazed to see how right in the middle of what would later be my childhood playground, the remnant of a bonfire was resting. A beggar woman, who had died not long before, lived in the house and kept herself warm there by burning pieces of wood, which had also caused all the walls to be stained with a gloomy ash color. Despite this absolutely funereal scene and my father’s opposition (he maintained that buying an apartment was something for charnegos), my beloved mother insisted on acquiring it, for which I am greatly thankful if, despite my condition as a rebellious son, I am still included in the will. By the work and grace of Ildefons Cerdà’s social utopianism, in the building at home that unfortunate homeless woman and wealthy families like the one on the main floor could share existence, in a huge apartment where they had an entire chapel that would end up badly sold and scattered among a thousand antique dealers, victim of heirs thirsty for cash.

I was thinking about all these stories (well, about my story) while contemplating the doorway of wooden crucifixes that welcomes visitors to the celebrated exhibition Domus Barcino by the photographer and antique dealer Jordi Baron. For two decades of collecting work, Baron has dedicated himself to photographing apartments in the Eixample in the very brief interregnum that occurs between the death of their owners, the immediate merciless looting by surviving family members in question, and the final emptying by the work and grace of the antique dealer. For the nationalists of the Eixample this is nothing new: in fact, we have all seen at some point a member of the Baron clan commanding a group of strongmen on some corner of our beloved Grid (we know it all too well, and may the family forgive my sardonic tone: the Barons have a secret power when it comes to knowing when an old woman on Mallorca street is about to breathe her last before the greedy gaze of a lineage that, before burying granny, is already dreaming of how they will spend a treasure of watercolors, books, and candelabras).

What Jordi Baron has done, it must be said from the outset, is a delight, for the artist approaches the abandoned apartments without the clinical pretension of the forensic scientist, portraying the living rooms of a Barcelona that was once well-off with the eyes of a romantic painter before the ruins of Athens and that somewhat sentimental notary involvement typical of the battle correspondent (physical absences "where humans have exercised their humanity," writes Plàcid Garcia-Planas, who knows a lot about the subject of war). Certainly, the images the artist gives us are a sculptural still life of a private life that we can only imagine and that the privileged eye of the photographer synthesizes in a farewell of joyful sadness. Fifteen photos, only fifteen, but thousands of stories, from the tension to know who keeps the first edition of a Rosselló-Pòrcel poetry book to the vision of an old woman for whom making broth and chatting with the tiles of Provença street every night was the only vital incentive. Miquel Bauçà knew it: the Eixample is a neighborhood of hermits and ill-matched neighbors.

What Jordi Baron has done, it must be said from the outset, is a delight, for the artist approaches the abandoned apartments without the clinical pretension of the forensic scientist, portraying the living rooms of a Barcelona that was once well-off with the eyes of a romantic painter before the ruins of Athens