Andreu Solsona
Director Barcelona

Looking back, everything was "young" in the eighties: Spanish democracy and the youth policy of the Barcelona City Council even more so. In 1985, the year of the first Biennial, Barcelona was the host city of International Youth Year, and that was also the year the city approved the Youth Project. A few months later, the "Transformers, a Shop Window of Youth Culture" facility was officially opened as a venue for exhibiting the work of young artists. Everything was new. Even we were young.
And because we were young, we were optimistic and we wanted it all. We wanted to be and we were "Barcelona, more than ever." We wanted to be the Olympic host city, the Mediterranean capital, the south of the north and the north of the south. The seed that the Italians of ARCI Kids sowed with the "Tendencias" exhibition in 1984 found enough fertile ground in Barcelona to develop and become the start of the Biennial adventure. At first, it seemed like a Tower of Babel, a mere folly, yet we later discovered, to our delight, that it really was.
As soon as the first Barcelona Biennial was over, an official commitment was made to host one every two years, thus the 1987 one was confirmed. This gave us two years to fine tune its character, counting on the experience of the first edition.
The team from the Youth and Sports Area, led by councillor Enric Truñó, took on the challenge of improving the new event with great responsibility and enthusiasm. And it has to be said that, given the youthful age of the team members, the Biennial was for most of them a wonderful school of management and international relations. We learned to turn visions into real projects, to experience them with intensity and to share them with participants and citizens.
More and more of us became involved in the conception and shared responsibility for the project.
The relationships between the various members of the recently formed International Committee helped us considerably to improve the profile of what needed to be reworked in this major event. Hence, it is worth recalling the invaluable opportunity to accompany the Barcelona delegation to Thessaloniki, which offered us a new perspective and allowed us to spy on a Biennial in rival territory, even though with the full agreement of the organization. When we remember that city, the evocation of Aphrodite will always come to mind. That adventure really represented a process of opening up towards the Mediterranean.
In addition to the Biennials, with the participants of the fashion section we were able to see the "vetrina" of the city of Prato in July 1987. This started a series of small sector-based exhibitions, which complemented the Biennial event in terms of time and themes.
The joint organizers of the Biennial 1987, along with the Barcelona City Council, were the city councils of Madrid, Seville and Valencia for Spain, Eurocréation for France, the General Secretariat of Youth of the Ministry of Culture for Greece, ARCI Kids Nazionale of Milan, Naples, Turin, Tuscany and Triveneto and the city councils of Bologna, Florence, Modena, Turin and Venice for Italy, the Secretaria d'Estado da Juventude - FAOJ for Portugal and the Cultural Service of the Ministry of Education for Cyprus. Various city councils and local, regional, and national organizations of France, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Portugal also collaborated.
The first measures taken as a result of the experience of the 1985 edition were the reduction of the number of participants and the redefinition of the areas. Luckily for us, we were able to count on many of the consultants who repeated the experience. The team of consultants was made up of: Pedro Azara (Architecture), Rosa Queralt (Visual Arts), Norberto Chaves (Design), Anna Maleras and Arnau Vilardebó (Performance), Manuel Esclusa (Photography), Joan Navarro (Comics), Joaquim Dols (Moving Images), Ignasi Riera (Literature), Victoria Romano (Fashion), Gloria Picazo (Multimedia) and Luis Hidalgo (Music). It would be unfair to overlook the professionals who passionately and unselfishly helped us improve our work: Víctor Jou in the area of Music, Francina Díaz in Fashion, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán in Literature, Cesc Gelabert in Dance, Josep Chías in Art Marketing. Together, we all achieved a rigor and professionalism that gave the 1987 edition a seal of quality right from the outset.
While we asked a renowned graphic artist to produce an image of the Rape of Europa to represent the first Biennial, for the third one we organized a competition for young artists in which over five hundred proposals were presented, and the winner was the twenty-six-year-old Enric Jardí. From this came the huge letter B for Barcelona and for the Biennial. Even today, many references and fixed expressions about the city are based on the letter B.
The selection was therefore not in any way a misguided one.
The current Barcelona Center of Contemporary Culture, in those days simply the former Casa de la Caritat and the setting for the first Biennial, was located in the center and offered us a good venue for the different exhibitions and a nerve meeting and debate center: it was our agora. From this base, it was easy to get to the other venues, such as the performance venues of the Institut del Teatre and the Aliança del Poblenou, the concert venues of Zeleste, Verdi, Cibeles, KGB, the much-missed Bikini and Studio 54, or the Palau d'Esports venue for fashion shows.
However, the outline on the city map was becoming larger than expected. A large series of bars, art galleries, bookshops and nightclubs were in fact opening up, creating an "Off" Biennial and demonstrating throughout the entire process the extent to which harmony was established between the public and private sector. Much of the city had valued the experience of 1985 positively and had joined the movement of young creators. Barcelona was bubbling with youthful effervescence and public activity.
In addition to the mobilization of the entire Barcelona City Council, we were able to count on invaluable contributions from the Youth Institute of the Ministry of Culture, the Caixa d'Estalvis de Catalunya, the ONCE (Spanish National Organization.