The event breathes new life into the emblematic cinema at the underground of Pelayo Street, which was part of the post Civil War urban project “Avenida de la Luz”: a passage below ground that started hosting household goods shops and transformed into a meeting point for countercultural leisure during the transition to democracy. Also known as “the laughter palace” for its initial programme of Disney films, the children’s pictures theatre transitioned into a porn cinema and ended up closing its doors with the Barcelona Olympics.

UnderLOOP brings back the old cinema to contemporary culture by giving visibility to a series of artists that work temporary or permanently at a local level, but outside the main commercial or institutional fabric of the city. In dialogue with the space, the selected works mark the importance of site-specificity and the development of landscapes and territories through the binary ‘individual-environment’ or ‘collective-environment’.