“The eye does not see things, but images of things that mean other things. […] You take delight not in a City’s seven or seventy-seven wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours…” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Alma; in spanish it means soul.

In what character the soul of a City identifies itself? Can the alma of a unique city like Barcelona be caught and exposed like a work of art? Or, instead, like a sorta of calling card? Maybe Port Vell, a point as much strategic as crucial for the city of Barcelona, can be the perfect place to install this special landmark. As an hystorical moment of meet and clash between land and water, the ancestral ground of origin of the city, it could answer to these questions.

Barcelona, if considered like an entity, owns this two unique faces that are the reflection of both its population and its physical, spatial and urban configuration: a distinct sense of Singularity, curiousness, but at the same time, of Collectivity. Like the various buildings develops their personal uniqueness -they are tall, large, small, huge, extravagant, mute, new, old, suspended or interred- into an harsh and regular urbanistic system, then the people of Barcelona acts the same way. A way that wants to demonstrate all the nuances of a specific culture, easing their sharing under the light of sun, with all of those who wants to share theirs.

So the pavilion tries to testify the spirit of the City, conceptually trying to return the identity of a place through its own history; give back the city to the city, to who already knows it and who does not. Like in a lively, vibrant theatrical scene, it wants to exhibit Barcelona and its strong personality, its free, open and playful lifestyle, by catching it and sharing it freely; all under a space that is not a space, but a cluster of connections between people, the City and -again- people. A lightweight, temporary volume, made of fishing net and suspended between land and water, become a typological landmark, catching people -almost literally- from all over the city, to show them freely the alma of the place.