Today, the CIBA, the old textile dye factory that stands in front of the muddy waters and grass expanse of the Parc Fluvial del Besòs, has become a feminist cultural centre. Across from it, in the corner, sits a bar, eerily named Bar Mississippi. The bar’s owner, a middle aged man from Zhejiang province, rearranges the terrace chairs outside. Two cyclists in full gear, who have peddled up from the bike lane running along the river’s bank, stare at the board by the bar’s door, announcing the menu of the day.

Looming Waters is a project by Tian Guoxin and Hannah O’Flynn for the SIT-RES 2026 residency program with Idensitat, in Barcelona. The project proposes a one year artistic research on the multiple textile histories woven through the Besòs river and its surrounding neighbourhoods.

Catalunya began its industrialisation in 1830s, led by a textile industry fuelled by the new implementation of the steam engine. These new factories were sustained through huge amounts of imported Asturian and British coal, American cotton and the African slave labour that farmed it, as well as big waves of national migrant labour. This booming new textile industry was to transform the Catalan landscape, with industrial colonies appearing along its rivers and the exponential growth of its cities. Social structures were also transformed, with the formation of an new working class and industrial bourgeoisie, as well as the consequent configuration of worker and feminist movements.

The the rivers feeding these factories’ steam engines carried down the impacts of their mass manufacturing, becoming a chemical trail of the industrial project. The historical absence of water treatment, the factories’ high demand for water and the new urban formations along the rivers made of the rivers vessels of coal fumes, bleach, synthetic dyes and mordants (chromium, copper, and iron salts), detergents, oils and solvents. As textile factories historically concentrated along the banks of rivers, so did the urban areas where workers resided. Therefore, the pollution  this industry generated impacted the working class in greater measure.

Like many other rivers across Catalunya, the Besòs river, flowing down from Montmeló, across the Eastern face of Barcelona, was to also have textile industrial colonies develop along its shores. Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Badalona i St. Adrià de Besòs, were to become one of these textile production centres, with the opening of factories such as Baró and Can Xiquet, as well as a textile dye factory, la CIBA. This area became the home to many national migrants from Aragon, Murcia and Valencia, as well as other parts of Catalunya. The density in textile industry as well as working class inhabitants would make it an area with a rich history in worker and feminist movements. In 1974, one of the biggest textile factories, Casadesport, fired one of its workers, triggering a famous women’s strike, where hundreds of textile workers fighting for their labour rights striked for a month, resulting in the firing of half of the factory’s employees.

In the 1970s, the Catalan textile industry started collapsing due to the 1973 oil shock and the competition with other industries with either cheaper labour or intensified productivity. It is in this decade that most of the factories in Sta. Coloma, Badalona and St. Adrià started closing down. In today’s Sta. Coloma, the old buildings of the CIBA and Can Xiquet remain, having become a feminist cultural centre and a school for occupational training.

In the 1990s there was a wave of Chinese migration to Barcelona, coming in great majority from Qingtian, in Zhejiang province. Much of the abandoned textile machinery in Sta. Coloma was bought by newly arrived immigrants, who set up workshops in the disused textile factories where they produced clothing for Spanish brands such as Inditex, Desigual or Cortefiel, between others. The reason for this phenomenon is that the initial investment to start a textile business with second hand machinery was much cheaper than doing so in the hospitality sector. As Chinese textile workshops grew in number in the area, the neighbourhoods around the Besòs became the home of the Chinese community, who concentrated not only in Sta. Coloma, but also in St. Andreu and Sagrera. Towards the end of the decade of the 2000s, he progressive enrichment of the Chinese community, as well as international competition and constant lowering of prices, would lead to the number of textile workshops shrinking.  Even after the dissolution of much of this textile industry, the whole Fondo area has remained an epicentre of the Chinese community of the Barcelona metropolitan area.

In 1999 the the municipalities of Barcelona, Sta. Coloma de Gramenet, St. Adrià de Besòs, and Montcada i Reixac proposed a greening plan for the Besòs river banks, which was to be inaugurated in 2004 as the Parc Fluvial del Besòs. The project aimed at the ecological improvement of the historically polluted river as well as the bettering of the life quality of the neighbouring inhabitants. The flip side of the improvement of living conditions along the river was that the prices of housing in the worker’s neighbourhoods along the Besòs became higher: 7% a year in St. Andreu, and 3-4% a year in Sta. Coloma since its opening, with an interruption after the 2008 crisis.

These two distinct aspects of the river's history are deeply interconnected through stories of industrial pollution: the formation of workers' communities along its banks; the disproportionate impact of pollution on these neighbourhoods; the role of ecological urban planning in both attempting to improve living conditions and triggering gentrification that renders life unaffordable for these communities; or the alignment of such ecological initiatives with the shutdown of local industrial production, whose relocation abroad also externalises the pollution it generates.

Looming Waters will take the form of a series of intersecting chapters of the different textile histories that weave through the waters of the river Besòs: a first chapter on the Chinese community that worked in the textile industry in the Fondo area between 1995 and 2010, a second on the former workers of the textile industry in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Badalona and St. Adrià who had migrated from other parts of the state, and a third on the intersections of water pollution, biodiversity, ecological planning and gentrification. Each of this chapters will take a different form, shaped by the specific topics and groups we are working with.