A taste of the real Plaza Real

A joint exhibition in Ocaña celebrates when Las Ramblas were the center of Barcelona's creative life.

You wouldn’t know it to look at it today, but at the fag end of the 70′s Las Ramblas were the center of the creative and intellectual blossoming that accompanied Spain’s transition into democracy. Rather than souvenir shops, and bars offering 1 euro shots and endless EDM to dazed tourists, the bars and streets around Plaza Real were a hive of fashion, chatter and open air drug deals, where anything went and anything could happen.

This wednesday, the Ocaña bar is hosting the opening for a joint exhibition that celebrates the anything goes spirt of the time as lived by the scenes’ unofficial queen, Jose Perez Ocaña. Together with the illustrator Nazario (who still lives in the area) Ocaña broke taboos and fought against discrimination with his activism, art and performances, a life’s work cut tragically short by his death in 1983.

As befits an artist who was more about looking forward than backwards, the exhibition features over 20 young artists working across video, photography, art and design who have all contributed to defining the city’s current visual language, through work that provokes, celebrates, and subverts the status quo in equal measure.