Tigre, 27

La Paloma is a ballroom where different generations and urban tribes gathered to celebrate dancing. It is considered one of the best night culture references in the world and the last city jewel when it comes to understand Barcelona´s nightlife. At the number 27 of the Carrer del Tigre, in the neighborhood of Raval, La Paloma embodied for more than a hundred years the heart of a very peculiar nightlife, of a genuinely offbeat atmosphere.

This modern and kitsch temple has been for many people a beloved place, a ritual of exorcism for hardships and grief, a vibrant and dreamy light in the dark of the night.

From late afternoon until the beginning of nightlife, La Paloma has been devoted to elderly people who seemed to celebrate a sort of group therapy to fight against some ravages of time, against loneliness. Avoiding any pathos, enveloped in a fervid red light, people in their seventies liberate themselves from their daily concerns at the rhythm of Cha Cha Cha, Tango and Paso Doble, before leaving the dancing floor to the youngest generation from midnight to early morning. For decades La Paloma has had this passionate and sassy double face life.

The photographic series Tigre 27 captures those glorious days with glowing contrasts, saturated red and black atmospheres, the hallucinatory swirl of the dancing crowd, the enveloping kisses, the melancholic dance of an old couple, and the eccentric disguises of the youngest. The work of Antoine Passerat takes over the atmosphere of the iconic ballroom while remaining linked to humans with kindness and understanding. The interest in everydayness, common life and “a priori” the banal, is only to prove the authenticity, the richness of diversity.