La Nau Bostik
C/ Ferran Turné, 1-11
08027 Barcelona, La Sagrera
For you cultural agitators, an interview with Xavier Basiana is an education in risk, cultural management, and how the Ajuntament de Barcelona plays the game. This architect, photographer and promoter (and the list goes on) moved from Manresa to La Sagrera as a young man and has been trying to pump culture and growth into it ever since. He mortgaged himself to the moon to buy and im-prove the abandoned warehouses you now know as Nau Ivanow and Espai 30 and, with blood, sweat and tears made them into Barcelona cultural fixtures in a neighborhood desperately in need of such spaces. He must have liked doing it, because he’s doing it again.
La Nau Bostik has been resting, aban-doned for 10 years alongside the wide expanse of train tracks that border La Sagrera. Now, it’s your newest cultural venue, and, since you’re just back from your international vacation, you’re primed and ready to be as cosmopolitan as ever and accept a 7-stop metro ride. La Nau Bostik is an industrial dinosaur in all of its beauty, glory amd grit. About 700m2 of exterior “patio” runs along the concrete loading docks that once con-nected trucks to 11 different glue-filled warehouses (four of which have been cleaned and equipped for cultural pur-poses). Several of the still-in-progress warehouses are earmarked for the neigh-borhood, because without local involve-ment it’s all just posa’t guapa. There will be a theatre school and theatre, a park-our school/playground, and expo space. And they haven’t even touched the three upper floors where somebody is current-ly shooting a horror film.
The idea is threefold. One: keep the complex standing. Apparently, it was once destined for demolition to make room for the new mega-Sagrera station and, while that’s no longer necessary, it’s still on the books for eventual destruc-tion unless it becomes something inspi-rational, alive and useful (read: unless people fight for it). Two: make it sustain-able. Like Nau Ivanow (for most of its first decade), this project is not propped up with public money. Self-sufficiency of the space will be achieved through A) lo-cal involvement and B) renting it out as a cultural space, event venue, etc. And three: breathe life into a neighborhood that isn’t exactly overflowing with open, well-equipped cultural facilities. We take our hat off to Xavier Basiana and his team, and want to tell you all that it will be our absolute pleasure to support you, that we’ll gladly travel seven metro stops, and that we’d like to thank you very much for opening a space of this sort in a city so desperate for just that.
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