BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
As we move through the holidays and look back on the year, it’s a pleasure to reconnect with photographer Fer Alcalá—one of the earliest photographers to work with us and a deeply knowledgeable chronicler of street art. Once again, he’s on the ground in Spain, working closely with artists and organizers, this time in Barcelona, and we’re pleased to share his photographs with BSA readers.
Barcelona’s urban art scene is again finding some footing at Nau Bostik, a former adhesive factory in the La Sagrera neighborhood that is one of the city’s most persistent sites for contemporary muralism. Last month B-Murals unveiled 13 new murals across the complex, marking the 10th anniversary of Nau Bostik as a community-managed cultural space. In a city where legal and informal street painting has been a subject of rowdy debate, and many would say has been in steady decline over the last 15 years, the scale and ambition of this project feels notable.
Fer Alcalá)
For context, Barcelona once played a central role in the European street art conversation, and enthusiastically so – giving the stage to many names that later grew in the popular imagination. By the late 2000s, however, stricter regulations, enforcement, and accelerating gentrification dramatically reduced opportunities for unsanctioned work in public space. Many artists left, adapted to studio practice, and shifted toward newly popped-up festivals elsewhere. Against that backdrop, Nau Bostik stands out as an exception—an artist-run and neighborhood-supported site where murals are not treated as decoration, but as a cultural practice worth protecting.
The most visible new interventions came from Emilio Cerezo and Martí SAWE, who each took on large exterior surfaces. Cerezo refreshed Nau Bostik’s main façade with a color-driven abstract composition developed through a participatory process with local residents, reinforcing the site’s collective identity. SAWE’s mural on the nearby Treball Digne bridge uses figurative and graphic elements to explore creative pressure, self-doubt, and momentum, drawing directly from his background in graffiti, illustration, and animation.
Fer Alcalá)
Cerezo also presented La Rutina del Sueño, an immersive installation inside the B-Murals gallery. The project extends his painted language into a spatial environment shaped by movement, light, and sound, with music by Ilia Mayer. Together, the exterior mural and interior installation add to the dialogue between public visibility and interior thoughts.
Each artist contributed a distinct piece, turning Nau Bostik’s courtyard into a microcosm of global street art – artists from Poland to Japan to Colombia and Madrid all contributed to the potpurri. Walking through, one can see the veteran spray-can styles of Werens and Chylo on one wall, versus the playful paste-ups of Rockaxson and Vantees on another. Laura Merayo’s contribution stands out with rustic, nature-inspired imagery that quietly pushes against the surrounding industrial architecture, while newer voices introduce illustration, abstraction, and narrative approaches that reflect how muralism continues to expand beyond its graffiti roots.
B-Murals describes the project as an ongoing act of cultural resistance, say organizers of the event, emphasizing that Nau Bostik survives not through institutional permanence but through active use, collaboration, and renewal. In a city that once defined street art and later restricted it, the walls here suggest a different model—one grounded in community stewardship rather than spectacle.
Artists this year included:
Emilio Cerezo (Totana, Spain), Martí SAWE (Barcelona, Spain), Andrea Devia Nuño (Colombia), Bunker (Spain), Chylo (Poland), Dan Bonssai (Madrid, Spain), Dana Alessi (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Laura Merayo (Zamora, Spain), NSN997 (Naples, Italy), Vantees (Brazil), Werens (Sabadell, Spain), Rockaxson (Chile), Schoko Tanaka (Japan).
About B-MURALS ART CENTER
“B-Murals is a specialized urban art center based in Barcelona. It is a singular and pioneering project for its comprehensive approach, which combines supporting creation through mural interventions, residencies, and exhibitions, with community work, education, reflection, and dissemination of this discipline, aiming to promote its growth and make it accessible to the broader public.”
‘La Rutina del Sueño’: Emilio Cerezo’s Immersive Exhibition
“In parallel with his monumental exterior work, Emilio Cerezo inaugurated the installation exhibition ‘La”
Rutina del Sueño’ in the B-Murals gallery, within the WCUB3 series. In this show, the artist expands his pictorial universe into a three-dimensional realm, converting the room into an immersive space where constantly moving forms explore the sensory limits between wakefulness and dream imagery, all enveloped by the hypnotic frequencies of Ilia Mayer.”
