Blood and Madness - Barcelona Showdown

256 pages
Text(s) by Jaume Gómez
Photos by Mark Madness
30.5 x 22.5 cm
Language: Spanish, English
Hardback, swiss binding
Publisher: Self-published
Edition of 1000 copies
2021

Barcelona Showdown is a photographic project that explores the richness of the graffiti subculture and its specific link with the Barcelona metro system since its inception, in the second half of the 80s, to the present.

Through a synoptic selection of interviews together with a fascinating photographic compilation with the will to do justice, Barcelona Showdown was born to represent and deal with the growing media manipulation around graffiti. For this, this publication values ​​all the circumstances and actors that shape the suburban game: the subway system, its architecture, its workers, security forces, technology, anti-graffiti media, writers that make sense to this game, as well as the repercussions that this game entails.

On a visual level, Barcelona Showdown is linked to the latest line of action photography developed by photographers such as Alex Fakso, Enrique Escandell, Nils Müller or Alex Partola, a link that falls in the preference for photographic capture of infiltration, sabotage and graffiti experience more than in their own formal results.

Barcelona Showdown is pure “mission” photography, a reflection of the writers’ experiences, their attitudes and their capacity for creation and mediation with the other actors of the Barcelona metro.