Periphery

An urban symphony from the margins of a European metropolis like Barcelona.
Periferia is a journey into the echoes of the past of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a municipality near Barcelona. Its residents transformed the suburb imposed upon them by Francoist speculation into a dignified city. That past reverberates in the present of its streets, squares, and faces.
Xavier Valls was the architect who developed the People's Plan, a pioneering experience in citizen participation. In 1987, he was assassinated by ETA in the Hipercor bombing. His children return to the basement where his personal archive was buried to recover that epic story and, with it, the story of an entire city in struggle.
Starting from this descent into memory, Periferia navigates in a spiraling motion through diverse spaces and characters of the city's present, inviting us to reflect on what sustains a city's urbanism and the architecture of our ways of life: What does it mean to be involved in a world that refuses to be transformed for the better? Once again, the peripheries reveal themselves to us as spaces where we can experiment with genuine ways of living.