Person, Anna Oswaldo Cruz

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Chantal Maillard, 1998 © Anna Oswaldo Cruz

Austrian and Brazilian by birth, Anna Oswaldo Cruz (The Hague, 1965) has lived in Río de Janeiro, Munich and, since 1990, in Barcelona. In the early 1990s, she began to produce portraits of a series of writers, artists and intellectuals living in the city at that time whose photographs appeared in numerous books, newspapers and magazines.

Viewed today, this collection of pictures makes up a kind of public and cultural sphere of an era, a portrait of Barcelona in which many of the subjects are individuals from other places and countries, drawn perhaps by an idea of cosmopolitanism inherited from earlier decades that reached a particular turning point in the social, economic and urban transformations brought about by the Olympic Games of 1992.

Whereas the 1990s in Barcelona can be read as a kind of liberal apotheosis that put an end to certain social differences, a triumph of homogeneity embodied in the middle classes, we have to ask ourselves what portrait would this less official sphere of culture in Barcelona present to us today? Which people feed it now?

To answer these questions, Anna Oswaldo Cruz has taken a series of photographs expressly for her project at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in which she considers those artists, writers, activists, architects and intellectuals who, 30 years on, not only talk to us of the people who produce critical knowledge in the city at the present time, but also about the changes in class, gender, race, background, etc. that have taken place in Barcelona society.

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