Barcelona

The Barcelona scene

One documented thread in Barcelona’s rope history is the career of a local teacher. According to his own biography, Alberto Noshibari organized a series of rope meetings, Encuentros de Cuerdas, at El Garage in Madrid in 2008, was invited to the London Festival of the Art of Japanese Bondage in 2009 and lists a shibari student group in Barcelona in 2013, as well as a monthly workshop series in the city, Nido de Cuerdas, that ran for more than a year. He lists occasional classes with teachers including Yukimura Haruki, Naka Akira, Hajime Kinoko, Kazami Ranki and Osada Steve, and he took part in the autumn editions of EURIX at schwelle7 in Berlin in 2014 and 2015. The wider European story is told in Kinbaku in Europe, and the scene in Spain’s capital on the Madrid page.

In January 2017 Time Out Barcelona’s guide to the city’s sexual culture listed Barcelona Shibari Dojo, a training center for shibari and kinbaku in a Japanese-style dojo where couples could take classes with a certified instructor and newcomers could join workshops.

Collectives and artist-led projects

Since 2017 Alberto Noshibari has run Noshibari Art, which he describes as a collective project for experimentation and teaching. Espacio Nos was founded and is directed by the interdisciplinary artist Pauline Massimo. It has programmed performances, among them Equilibrium in 2021 and Jardín Salvaje in 2022, in which Massimo performed with Marlène Jöbstl and Gestalta. Espacio Nos says its introductory classes are aimed mainly at LGBTQI+ people and women and can be taken alone, as self-tying, or as a pair. It no longer has a studio of its own and now rents similar spaces for pop-up events.

Jams and courses

The most regular fixture is Rope Jam Barcelona, run by a group of rope enthusiasts. It meets every Sunday from 5 to 8 p.m. in a rented dance studio, without booking, for a small fee. It says it follows feminist values, welcomes everyone, puts safety and respect first and deliberately has no rule on nudity, since it regards such a rule as body-shaming, and it keeps boxes of communal jute for people without rope. Its site lists local teachers, among them Alberto Noshibari, Barcelona Shibari Dojo, Glü Wür and Pauline Massimo. For what happens at a jam, see Rope jams, munches and salons.

Sala de Luz, a Barcelona venue, sells tickets for rope jams and for multi-session courses: self-suspension levels and intensives taught by the performer Aisha Cruz, and courses on shibari structures and bedroom rope she co-teaches with Glü Wür.

Rope in public

Shibari has also been shown to a general audience. In the summer of 2023, Time Out Barcelona reported, the city’s erotic museum held a series of live shibari shows together with a photo exhibition by Polo Picart, for adults only. The same article noted that shibari is usually practiced in private.

Languages

Sala de Luz’s course listings and Espacio Nos’s class pages are in Spanish; Rope Jam Barcelona publishes its site in English and Spanish.