Over the two past decades the city of Barcelona has become a point of reference for cultural tourism. The intense activity in the spheres of art and of town planning, and particularly the opening of new art centres and the modernisation of existing museums, alongside the growth of the city’s sculptural heritage have proven to be decisive factors. This new collection of trilingual pocket guides comprising exhaustive updated documentation is introduced by the volumes dedicated to museums, foundations and exhibition halls, and to the sculptures designed for public spaces by some of the most outstanding twentieth-century artists, including Baumgarten, Calder, Chillida, Gargallo, Merz, Miró, Tàpies, Turrell…

The new collection of trilingual pocket guides comprising exhaustive updated documentation was introduced by the volumes dedicated to museums, foundations and exhibition halls, to the sculptures designed for public spaces, and for the best selling volume dedicated to Contemporary Architecture 1979-2010.

This guide (Barcelona 1979-2012. Contemporary Architecture City Guide)begins, intentionally, with the year that the first municipal elections were held (after the Franco dictatorship time). It thus spans the period of democratic government in the city from 1979 to the present day. Many transformations have occurred during this time, in particular in the urban and social realms. The links created between the city's various neighbourhoods, the opening of new squares and, above all, the infrastructure put in place for the Olympic Games hosted in 1992 laid the foundations for a new urban model, which has been praised by experts around the globe in the last 15 years.

This guide, with its lavish, up-to-date visual information, features a wide-ranging series of works, from modest urban improvement plans to the ambitious projects undertaken by world-renowned architects such as Herzog & de Meuron, Arata Isozaki, Norman Foster, Toyo Ito and Jean Nouvel.

• This pocket guide in three languages (English, Spanish, Catalan) is an up-to-date, detailed digest of the evolution of the architecture and urban development of Barcelona from the city’s origins to the present day.

• This volume included ambitious projects like the22@new technological districtin Barcelona'sPoblenou, theurban transformation of the La Mina district with the Fòrum 2004 or the new business area on Gran Via

Contributions by Christine Pinault (Picasso Administration), Rosa Maria Malet (manager of the Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona), Txomin Badiola (responsible for the Catalogue Raisonné of Jorge Oteiza), Judith Goldman (member of the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board) and Véronique Wiesinger (manager of the Alberto y Annette Giacometti Foundation), among others.

Determining the authorship and originality of artistic works is a key element essential for fully enjoying the art and for the correct functioning of the market and many cultural centres. It is one of the tasks falling upon institutions and different categories of people from artists’ foundations to museums, public administrations, academics, gallery owners and art collectors…

All those concerned by it encounter many problems when conducting the task. This book, derived from an international seminar organised by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation diffuses the knowledge, experience and opinions of some of the most prestigious experts on these subjects. Furthermore, it provides some new angles, proposals and linguistic elements that can help to understand the difficulties presented by the topic and to improve its legal regulation.

Following “The Expert versus the Object” by Ron Spencer and “The Value of Art” by Michael Findlay (published by Ediciones Polígrafa last May), “The Authorship, Authentication and Falsification of Works of Art” constitutes the third volume in the collection “Art, the Market and Law”, driven by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation. This collection began in 2011 with the intention of promoting legal, financial and artistic knowledge that contribute in a general manner to the protection, conservation, diffusion and fame of artistic heritage, specifically the heritage created by Salvador Dalí.

Lluís Peñuelas has been the general secretary of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation from 1990 to date. He is responsible for managing the Foundation’s four museums and their general administration.

The Joan Miró Foundation was the first public institution set up in Barcelona to focus entirely on contemporary art.Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert––its designer––,a founder member of GATCPAC (a leading group in the introduction of the Modern architecture in Catalonia),had first met in 1932 and became close friends working both for the Spanish (Republican) Pavilion at the Paris World Fair in 1937.After the first big retrospective of the work of Joan Miró in Barcelona (1968),the artist had decided to set up a building to make his work accessible to the public on a permanent basis.Sert was commissioned,and created an open-plan structure where the interior space communicated with the exterior,producing a perfect balance between architecture and landscape.From these dates,the Foundation was expanded two times,and the architect commissioned to carry out this task was Jaume Freixa, a pupil of Sert's who had worked with him for eleven years at Harvard and had played an active part in the creation of the Foundation.

Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Moià, Barcelona, 1959) is internationally renowned for his activities in mechatronic performances and his interactive installations. From his earliest days, as founder of the theatre company La Fura dels Baus in 1979, Marcel·lí has assembled his own special universe of interests, to which he has contributed (among other things) his interest in Outsider Art, the trends of the 1960s, technology, science, comics and popular traditions. This personal universe is completed by his embracing of particular aspects of the human experience such as food, sex and death.

For over two decades, the performance art that lies at the heart of Marcel·lí’s work has been immersed in digital technology. During this time, he has developed a working procedure he has dubbed “Systematurgy”; a practice that is characterized by the concept of user participation. 

This book explains the concept of Systematurgy through a first- person narrative that also offers us an insight into the genesis and form of projects ranging from Joan, l’home de Carn (1992) to the exhibition Systematurgy: Performances, Devices and Drawings, that was showed at Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona (2014) and lends its title to this book. Included within these pages is a glossary of the artist’s concepts, along with his manifestos and a full chronology of his artistic activities.

Faced with the critical discourse that appears to have reduced narration to an element removed from the spirit of dance, “Antistories” attempts to rehabilitate the story, presents the whys and the wherefores of an infinite history of intersections, convergences and complications between the malice’s of narration and the malice’s of dance. It does so by identifying the evidence of a dance secretly inscribed in the unexpected events of the story (from its original form, the myth, to its latest derivations, in the post-modern novel) and it does so through dialogue with different protocols of thinking and doing, from figurative art to 20th Century philosophy, from physics to biology.

This heterogeneous book speaks about clouds, water lilies, shipwrecks, panoramas, fabrics, warps and wefts, without losing sight for an instant of the most varied expressions in dance today and the plurality of authors that shape their poetry like that of an “extreme” story. What it offers is not simply a revolutionary read on the brotherhood of body and story, but rather a general theory that attempts, dynamiting some common areas of criticism, to rehabilitate the choreographic vocation of modern dance, discover the ornamental roots of performing dance, and demonstrate that dance, like all myths, constitutes something like an admirably “collateral” effect.

Roberto Fratini holds a PhD in Performing Arts from the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona and teaches the Theory of Dance in the Conservatori Superior de Dansa of Barcelona. He is a dramatist and essayist. He has created various dramaturgies for choreographers in Spain, France, Italy and Switzerland and regularly runs specialised courses and workshops on the theory and dramaturgy of dance in different university institutions and European theatres.