Barcelona Virtual Modernista Fair 2020

This year 2020 we will unfortunately not be able to enjoy the Fair in the streets as we have always done because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We will not be able to experience the festival surrounded by the Modernista buildings in Carrer Girona and the surrounding area. But the Fair must go on and given that technology provides us with a multitude of possibilities, we will stage a virtual edition!

We want to reach everyone without people having to leave home, with all the safety and quality, and thereby be able to celebrate the 2020 Fair through the Barcelona Modernisme Route’s YouTube channel.

This edition will not have a number, given that it will be a virtual edition, and we hope that next year we will be able to hold the 16th edition, although this is still to be determined.

The Fair this year will be dedicated to the writer, journalist and feminist Dolors Monserdà, to mark the occasion of the Monserdà Year on the occasion of the centenary of her death (Barcelona, 1845-1919).

As usual, we will start the Fair with a talk dedicated to this year’s theme: Carme Mas, philologist, and Marta Pessarrodona, curator of the Monserdà Year, will talk about her life and work in a presentation entitled “The Modernity of Dolors Monserdà”. We will also have another opportunity to learn more about this writer in an interview with Marta Pessarrodona by Luís Bosch, head of the Barcelona Modernisme Route.

As part of the social interaction project it has been implementing since 2011 in order to recover the visual memory of the Eixample and strengthen the identity of the neighbourhood, Casa Elizalde will publish the video A festes em convides! Celebracions populars en els carrers de l’Eixample (You invite me to parties! Traditional celebrations in the streets of the Eixample), featuring images from the period.

There will once again be a performance by Descabelladas, a theatre workshop group for women who have overcome or are going through cancer. For this edition, they will be presenting He nascut per reivindicar (I was born to demand), a dramatized reading of various emblematic texts by Dolors Monserdà.

Casa Amatller, designed by the Modernista architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, contains a secret on its façade, and the Casa Museu Amatller and Casas Singulares reveal it to us in the video L’ametller florit (The flowering almond tree): a verse from a poem by Monserdà.

Finally, Barcelona’s cemetery organisation will reveal to us where the writer is buried in the video La casa eterna de Dolors Monserdà (Dolors Monserdà’s eternal house), a tomb considered to be part of the city’s heritage and also designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, who, it is interesting to note, was the writer’s son-in-law.

You will be able to see all these activities on the Modernisme Route channel from 7 June 2020: https://www.youtube.com/rutadelmodernismedebarcelona 

BCN Modernista Fair 2020