This travelling group exhibition of graphic humour on real estate speculation returns almost two decades after its first opening on 17 November 2006 and will once again hang in one of the first places it visited and then travel to more than 25 galleries in different provinces of the country.
Especula en Acción was set up and grew spontaneously with the sole objective of raising awareness, from a humorous point of view, about the reality of the problem of the "real estate boom", the wild speculation and its environmental and social consequences.
This is partly bad news. The organisers felt that little has changed on the housing issue since that bleak picture portrayed by 28 authors in their cartoons in the mid-2000s and that today, almost 20 years later, it is, unfortunately, still very much up to date.
Specula en acción returns to Barcelona and can be visited from 12 to 31 December at the Centre Cívic Torre Llobeta, where it was mounted from 18 January to 6 February 2007 as the second stop on its long tour and where all the material from that exhibition was kept.
I have not been able to contact all the authors because so much time has passed that I have lost track of many of them and their e-mail addresses have changed. There has even been enough time for some of them to have left us forever, such as Raquel Orzuj (1939-2018). So I will keep trying to move the notice through this text or by other means. If you are one of them and want to spread the word, good for you.
The opening will be on Friday 12 December at 19:00 and afterwards, to reflect on this theme, there will be a session of"Theatre of the Oppressed. Forum Theatre" by the Nou Barris neighbourhood theatre group BABEL. The facilitator is Estela Cometta LLauró. Info, location and contact details.
Details of Especula en Acción and author profiles.
As a curiosity, the cartoon of the poster was widely circulated in its day and even ended up illustrating the cover of the book"Costa Nostra" about the mafias of the Costa del Sol, published by the Atrapasueños publishing house and written by Miguel Díaz Becerra and Antonio Romero.
Advocacy
And a note on the fly to apologise to those who read this site from any feed reader (we are the resistance), such as Feedly or similar that last night received an avalanche of notifications. A couple of friends(1),(2) already warned. I had an issue with the language plugin that forced me to temporarily deactivate it to patch it up and WordPress understood that they were "new" posts and a pile of posts of translations in different languages were launched all at once through the feed. I've fixed it now, I hope.
