Barcelona: Domestic @ Espai Cultural Caja Madrid - Last call!

Some people – like myself – enjoy seeing pictures of people in their “private” environment. In their house. For my is a mixture of voyeur-ness and also a new line to imagine their lives and how they related to yours. For the last two months, the Espai Cultural Casa Madrid in Barcelona has open to the public “Domestic”, a photography and new media exhibition that means to give a new reading n the contemporary house – on what we call home (or family) and why we do it.
Situated just by Plaça Catalunya, it's a nice stroll in a quiet and shadowy place when you're tired of walking, And in the walls, all the pictures to people eating, sleeping, getting married, denouncing abuses or just posing for the photographer seem like small windows to other lives (attention to a specific series, “Through the window” of Giorgio Barrera”).
There are also four quite eye-catching video work about the capturing of such image: what kind of story each ones tells about their own photography, how do you live according to the country you are in and a interactive game of pre-conceived ideas: you must matched the videos of some houses with people (a butcher, a policeman, an opera singer...).
Other interesting thing are some small books scattered through the exhibition with special collections of pictures: the giving birth of a girl in her parents house, the wedding of a gay couple from San Francisco in Barcelona, the domestic pictures that you can do in the intimacy of your house for a year. There is also an online project where people can upload their own “Domestic” images. Take a peak here.
Maybe some of the walls are too much – with too many pictures to see – but overall you get the feeling at the end of the show that it is always worth to look a little bit further and try to understand what else is behind that quiet or silly neighbor of yours.
(The image in this post is the first very big picture of the exhibit called “False appearances” (2005) from Frédéric Nauczyciel)

Domestic (29.4.2010 - 27.6.2010)
Espai Cultural Caja Madrid
Plaça de Catalunya, 9. Barcelona
Free entrance to the exhibitions.
Opening hours – Monday through saturday, 10 to 21hrs. Sundays and holidays, 10 to 14 hrs.
Webpage