From 21 November to 21 December 2024, Drap-Art, the International Festival of Sustainable Art, will be held in Barcelona

The event, now in its 28th edition, proposes an exhibition route and a cultural circuit through different galleries, emblematic buildings, streets and squares of the Gothic Quarter. Interventions, exhibitions and activities that can be enjoyed completely free of charge and that vindicate sustainability through art, recovering forgotten or disused objects to give them a second life.

Under the heading Drap-Art Indoors, this year the Festival’s program includes indoor spaces, such as Base Elements Urban Art Gallery, Espai del Borsí, Test Gallery, Sala Perill, la Bien Cuadrado and the Drap-Art Gallery itself, which together exhibit more than a hundred works. Projects by a total of 60 artists, including guests, selected by public call and a selection of artists from the Balearic Islands, which will show the richness and diversity of the current trends in urban, contemporary and sustainable art, both in our country and in Europe and the rest of the world.

Among the works that make up the rich and creative artistic program of the Festival Drap-Art’24, the public will be able to reflect on striking performative interventions such as “Masa de elecciones”. A work by the Colombian Andrea Verbel Vanegas, a visual artist professionally focused on costume direction, and who, under her pseudonym Garbage Guerrillera, in 2018, intervened in the public space of the German city of Augsburg with the parade of a dress weighing 20 kg that she embroidered for two months, using plastic, cardboard and electronic waste. Or contemplate poetic proposals such as the project of the London artist Errol Sari, based in Barcelona, who from his studio Mono 30, in the Poble-Sec neighbourhood, reuses cans found on the beach of Barcelona and plastic caps brought to him by neighbors to make his pieces.

Drap-Art Outdoors, meanwhile, brings together the open-air actions of the Festival concerning sustainability in all its spheres -artistic, social and environmental-, in different enclaves of the public space of the Gothic Quarter. One of the highlights of the many activities will be the inaugural concerts in Plaza del Rey, on Saturday 23 November, and the Artistic Recycling and Sustainable Consumption Market that will take place every Saturday during the Festival period in Plaza Real.

This program, together with the exhibition route, makes Drap-Art’24 an immersive and participatory sustainable art circuit, which for a month will turn the center of Barcelona into a meeting point for artists, art lovers, new audiences, neighbors and local entities, as well as contributing to the sustainable and intercultural urban transformation of the city. In this 28th edition, the Drap-Art association, organizer of the event, wants to pay special attention to the current global socio-political context where war conflicts are taking center stage.

“We are approaching our 30th anniversary and want to reflect on the evolution of activism in the field of art and sustainability in these almost three decades of history. There is no sustainability without peace. We need a return to humanist values to achieve true sustainability in all aspects,” assures Tanja Grass, director of the Festival and of the association, since its inception.

For this reason, on Saturday, December 21, coinciding with the celebration of the Rebirth Day, the Third Paradise project of the pioneer of environmental art and main representative of Arte Povera, Michelangelo Pistoletto and his organization Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, Drap-Art, has organized within the framework of the Festival, a playful-festive massive “Demonstration-Procession-Parade for Universal Peace and Human Empowerment”. The rally will include the participation of renowned international artists such as Eddy Ekete, Little Shilpa, and national artists such as Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca, and will end with the collective creation of a giant heart made by the children of the schools of Ciutat Vella. This program, together with the exhibition route, will make Drap-Art’24 an immersive sustainable art circuit open to the general public.