photographAnna Vives (Leicester): Aesthetics and Urban Landscape

Poetry in the City in 21st Century Barcelona

Location: Research Beehive 2.20, Old Library Building
Time/Date: 17th May 2012, 16:00 - 17:00

Barcelona has experienced a great deal of architectural redesign in the last few years, especially with regard to the mitgeres. The mitgeres are anonymous city walls, fractures in the urban fabric that are exposed to the public in a permanent provisional state. The Institute of Urban Landscape in Barcelona, which is a department of the City Council, works to integrate such walls into the urban scene by redesigning and embellishing them, and a number of them have been decorated with Catalan Avant-garde visual poetry (including works by Carles Sindreu, Joan-Salvat Papasseit, Josep M. Junoy and Joan Brossa). These mitgeres convert the initial (in some cases predominantly aesthetic) value of the poetic piece into an investment in the quality of city life. In particular, Barcelona redesigned 164 mitgeres in the period 2008-2011, and the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Olympic Games in the city will surely benefit from this urban development, especially given that some of the mitgeres include references to sport. I hypothesise that in some cases the display of Catalan Avant-garde poetry in the city can be used to reflect, for instance, on the importance of Football Club Barcelona in the shaping of Barcelona’s (and Catalonia’s) identity. This is the case of the poem ‘Futbol’ by Sindreu, which is displayed on a city wall next to the Camp Nou (Barcelona’s football stadium) and refers to the 1928 final of Spain’s Championship, won by FCB.

I will consider the historical context surrounding the creation and display of these poems on city walls. This will allow me to compare how these works were perceived in the past, and how their re-location is underpinned by a new sociopolitical agenda and at the same time contributes to shaping the identity of Barcelona. I will also explore the extent to which and in what ways the public space of Barcelona interpellates its citizens and visitors (Jameson, 1997). I will base my methodology on Michel de Certeau’s input on the practice of everyday life as it establishes useful links between art and city life (1984). Furthermore, I will adopt the notion of heterotopias, understood as spaces that contest the established socio-political system (Foucault, 1994), in order to elaborate a more in-depth reading of the new socio-political implications of the poems displayed. Finally, I will examine how the tension between the global (with the focus on cultural and technological industries) and the local produces a particular image of Barcelona (Harvey, 1996). In short, I will look at how a number of Catalan Avant-garde poems have recently changed (or are currently changing) the visual and social image of Barcelona, and how a work (e.g. a poem) that did not necessarily have any clear political aim originally can help to keep Barcelona on the map whilst serving as a manifesto in support of Catalan nationalism.   

Published: 13th January 2012