Bllbao now has another major venue to rival the Guggenheim (which still looks like an uncanny spaceship sitting alongside the river in this Basque city).  La Alhondiga is a striking and beautifully converted building right in the town centre, restored by the city and re-designed by Philippe Starck, containing galleries, cinema, sports hall and swimming pool - as well as several restaurants and cafes still being worked on by numerous men on ladders during our visit this week - which opened for business last weekend with 60,000 visitors passing through in three days.The opening exhibitions Native Land - curated by Paul Virilio with Raymond Depardon with an amazing data based installation by D&S&R - http://www.nativeland-stopeject.com/r2.php5 - and Proyecto Tierra which has been curated by Alicia Chillida who has also edited a publication of the same name featuring texts and images by Muntadas, Gordon Matta-Clark and others.  In contrast to the Guggenheim which charges everyone including local residents around 16 euros for entry, this new venue is targeted as being acessible and participatory, shaped for those living within the locality to feel at home: the signage is duly in Euskara and Spanish (with no English) and the price of entry is low, around 3 euros for the exhibitions and entering the venue itself is free.  It's an experiment in relation to housing a series of different activities under a common roof and one worth watching for those interested in development of flagship buildings as a means of stimulating 'culture'....often the model followed by local, city and regional governments is one of 'destination tourism' and ultimately this means consumption rather than production or participation within 'culture' - 'pull' rather than 'push'. In framing La Alhondiga primarily for the people who live in this region, something else might occur complementing and re-engineering notions of cultural tourism especially in this period of crisis for ideas of the creative economy among others.  The event I was part of was a really good example of how this might work. <http://www.alhondigabilbao.com/web/guest/programacion/proyecto-tierra/blog> Rather than staging cold presentations on the topic of 'visual arts in a period of global financial crisis' we spent the morning brainstorming the topic finding affinities among the speakers (who came from as far afield as Japan, US and Ecuador) and then doing presentations which inflected and reflected off the common and uncommon ground. In the evening we met up with Jorgen Leth Danish experimental film-maker who made The Perfect Human and who turned out to truly know more than we did about crisis - his house in Haiti where he lives and works was totally destroyed during the earthquake: he told us how he was working on editing his latest film - The Erotic Human - during the quake with his production team and found himself standing dazed and totally traumatized outside the house, clutching nothing but his Apple Mac which he thinks he must have brought with him as he had felt it to be part of his body - everything else was lost and left behind.  Two of his production team had done exactly the same thing.

Back on the road again these last two weeks - first to China where I spent two days in Shanghai managing to fit in a brief visit to the Expo which I found enthralling despite wondering how on earth one can justify this level of investment in something so temporary. The noises in the Chinese press about this being the greenest, most sustainable Expo in history (with the fleet of almost noiseless fuel powered buses that carry visitors along the site partially convincing one in this regard) are countered by the knowledge not just that the show will end before next Chinese New Year, but also that so much and so many have been disrupted, shifted, deterritorialised and ripped out to make way for this oh so grand extravaganza that is expected to draw in millions of people but on the first month's showing has fallen well short of target numbers.   The Briccocafe has to be the  place to head for sustenance and wifi access before you head into the gorgeous Seed Cathedral created by Thomas Heatherwick, described in one of the Expo websites as follows : 'The England Pavilion is themed by “Creation”, on the surface of which will witness a large number of colorful whiskers dancing with the wind'.....'  It's one of those rare constructions that makes you feel uncorrupted as you disappear back from the Pudong site back across the river, under the bridge, surrounded by gentle old Chinese people sipping water from jamjars and nibbling at cucumbers.