El Raval, cradle of Catalan rumba

El Raval, cradle of Catalan rumba

The Raval district saw the birth of Catalan rumba in the 1950s. Almost seventy years later, two medians of the Calle de la Cera will show sculptures in homage to this musical genre, thanks to a participatory process carried out with the gypsy community of the neighborhood.

The Calle de la Cera is considered the place where the Catalan rumba was born. The proposed artistic and aesthetic, which will decorate the dividing walls of numbers 6 and 57, will illustrate and recreate the memory of this site. The councilor of the Ciutat Vella District, Gala Pin, explained that, initially, a participatory process was carried out with the residents of the street to change it, there are containers located in a small corner, and from there "they were the same neighbors who claimed to be able to do a work around the historical memory of the street ".

The beginning of a community work

With the design and installation of medians, a community work is also launched with different entities of the neighborhood, which, driven by the Cultura Viva program of the Institute of Culture of Barcelona (ICUB) and led by the cooperative LaFundició, proposes to the neighborhood the recovery of the Catalan rumba to the daily life of the Raval.

The rumba, an ascending phenomenon

The manager of collecting the demand of the original community of the neighborhood and translating it into a sculpture that reflects the spirit of the history of the Catalan rumba, has been the artist Luís Zafrilla. The work consists of an ascending narrative discourse, divided into two parts, one for each party, which form a single unit.

The first, located at number 57 on Calle de la Cera, focuses on the time when this genre was born and shows the images of mythical characters such as El Orejas, El Chacho, Ramonet or Peret, as well as fragments of songs, guitarists , dancers and palmeros that cross to give meaning to the history of the rumba.

In the number 6 of the same street is the great mark and the legacy that the Catalan rumba has left in the music scene, from the eighties to the present day, which has promoted the creation of new rhythms thanks to the miscegenation and the mixture of styles.

More insulation

With the completion of the work, which is scheduled for January 2018, the conditions of both buildings will also be improved and thermal insulation will be installed. 105,000 euros will be allocated for the development of the project.

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