Barcelona’s historic La Modelo prison, long a symbol of repression, became an unexpected concert venue during the Grec Festival. Violinist Asia led a musical tribute inside the former penitentiary, honoring late Franco-era prisoners who once filled its halls with Bach on a battered piano. The event reinterpreted the prison’s charged atmosphere, linking its history to the building’s architecture through sound and challenging its punitive legacy.
La Modelo opened on 9 June 1904 and operated for 113 years. Designed by architects Salvador Vinyals i Sabaté and Josep Domènech i Estapà, the complex follows a radial, panoptic plan associated with Jeremy Bentham. Galleries extend from a basic point, watched over by a tower designed for surveillance. During Francoism, the institution became a symbol of political and trade-union repression, holding many political prisoners. Barcelona now describes the site as a community space devoted to memory, culture and education.
The performance drew inspiration from a basic moment in 1973, when Pere Portabella and Carles Santos were detained in La Modelo. Portabella encouraged Santos to reinterpret Bach on an out-of-tune piano, a conceptual act meant to reclaim the prison through music. Decades later, Asia’s concert-action echoed that gesture in the galleries where those events unfolded. The audience sat in the prison’s panopticon, once built for surveillance and now repurposed as a stage for artistic expression.
The evening began with a percussionist moving through the galleries, striking the doors and bars with drumsticks, then hitting the walls. The sounds reverberated through the corridors, turning the prison’s architecture into a resonant instrument. The performer’s visible exhaustion and focus heightened the tension before he took his place at a drum set in the center of the panopticon. This gradual build-up led the audience through barred gates into another gallery, where the basic ensemble awaited.
Central to the performance, eight tuba players in matching attire and red bowler hats sat on platforms facing Asia, who stood out in white and red. The arrangement evoked a static procession, a visual metaphor for the enforced immobility of prison life. The music unfolded in seven movements. The tubas’ deep, majestic tones, an homage to Carles Santos and his use of brass ensembles, contrasted with the sharp, agile lines of Asia’s violin. High and low registers filled the gallery, while the open cells let sound seep into every corner, reinforcing the idea that space itself can become an instrument.
Throughout the 55-minute performance, the audience moved between unease and fleeting beauty, with memory shaping the experience. Some spectators lay on the floor, watching as leaflets reminiscent of a prison uprising drifted down from above. Unpredictable rhythms and shifting harmonies conjured confinement and change, recalling a time when the streets outside played “Algo más” by Camilo Sesto, while inside La Modelo Bach, albeit out of tune, resonated.
The event is part of a broader trend of reimagining historical sites through art and performance. Similar projects include David Byrne’s “Playing The Building,” which turned architecture into musical instruments, and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s use of a damaged piano after the Tohoku disaster, a tribute to ability to recover and imperfection. La Modelo’s change for the Grec Festival shows how spaces marked by history can be reclaimed for collective memory and creative expression. Elsewhere, controversial reinterpretations of the past have also sparked debate, as when Claudio Savoia’s remarks on the Malvinas War drew widespread attention in Argentina.
La Modelo, once a site of punishment and silence, now invites new ways of listening to a place marked by history. The concert honored those who endured its walls and explored how art can reshape narratives. The city’s ongoing use of the complex for guided visits and artistic interventions reflects its wider change into a civic and cultural space. As cultural events take hold in unconventional venues across Spain, performances continue to reshape how people encounter memory and place.
