Benidorm installs photos from the Municipal Archive in urban furniture, turning them into artistic supports

Benidorm City Council has already installed fifty black and white photographs from the Municipal Archive in elements of the public thoroughfare such as electrical and traffic light control panels or underground containers, which thus become "exhibition supports". The Councilor for Historical Heritage, Ana Pellicer, explained that "until now these elements had only logistical functionality, while now they also operate as artistic exhibition spaces aesthetically integrated into our urban fabric."

Pellicer recalled that "just over two years ago, within the framework of the 'A Pie de Calle' campaign, we placed old photographs of Benidorm on the facades of El Torrejó municipal building and Boca del Calvari Museum, on the stairs that connect Pescadores street with Elche Park and in the last stretch of access to La Creu”. With this initiative "we had a double objective: to make known through images the evolution and past of Benidorm and to improve and beautify the urban aesthetic".

According to the mayor, "this initiative has been growing and expanding to exceed 50 photographs and fifty improvised 'canvases' on our streets, in different neighborhoods." "And the intention -she stressed- is to continue adding spaces and thus advancing in our concept of Benidorm as a great open-air museum".

For this, in addition to operating as up to now on the spaces and elements of municipal property, "we encourage the communities of owners to make their facades, side walls or perimeter walls available to this initiative to fill Benidorm with photographs of the city in black and white, giving our urban scene a further attraction”.

In this regard, she clarified that "they do not necessarily have to be images from the Municipal Archive, but they can be photographs provided by the communities or individuals themselves."

To date, around 40 photographs have been placed in electrical and traffic light centers, and a dozen in underground containers through the service concessionaire. All the images "come from the collections of the Municipal Archive, are dated in the 50s and 60s of the last century, and show a Benidorm that is opening up to tourism, in full evolution and process of tourist transformation, that many generations have not known and that For that same reason, we believe it is very interesting to make it known”. Part of these photographs bears the signature, among others, of Francisco Pérez Bayona, Quico 'El Fotógrafo' and Simeón Nogueroles, two of the great visual chroniclers that Benidorm has had in the last seven decades.