Space in Motion: Barcelona and the Stages of (In)visibility

Barcelona and the Projection of Catalonia Guest Editor: Brad Epps Space in Motion: Barcelona and the Stages of (In)visibility Brad Epps ϕ a Professor of Romance Languages and L iteratures at Harvard University . He has published over fifty articks on modem literature , film, art, and architecture from Spain, Latin America, Catalonia, and France and is the author of Significant Violence : Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo (Oxford UP, 1996). He is currently preparing two books: Daring to Write, on queer issues in Latin America, Spain, and Latino cultures in the United States, and Barcelona and Beyond, on the city and modern Catakn culture. Amb molt de seny i força rauxa hem endreçat Barcelona.... —Miquel Domingo i Clota and Maria Rosa Bonet i Casas When Barcelona comes into view nowadays, it almost always seems to be shining. A rehabilitated waterfront; rapid expressways; a plethora of new and refurbished public sculptures, squares, and parks; gleaming new shopping complexes; sparklingly renovated Modernist façades; world-class festivals, swanky new restaurants, clubs, and bars, and masses of fun-loving people: such are the props of this city by the sea. Elegant, vibrant, sunny, sexy, and at times even a little raucous, but also ever so homey, practical, business-like, and controlled , Barcelona is a study in contrasts, at once a small town and a metropolis, appreciative of tradition and open to innovation, bilingual and multicultural in one complex sweep. But the city has other sides, far from the glitter and glamour, the kitsch and serialized vulgarity, of the tourist trade. Like any city, Barcelona can be dirty and dull and downright dangerous, indifferent to its local residents and rude to its visitors, prone to red tape, stalled public projects, and haughty market-oriented initiatives. What critic Llà tzer Moix calls the city of architects—and what architect Ricardo Bofill calls, more self flatteringly, the city of the architect—is also, as Josep M. Prim reminds us, a city of the downcast and delinquent, of nonEuropean Union immigrants, okupes and the homeless, the aged and the infirm. If many of the architects, urban planners, politicians, bureaucrats, and pundits invoke New Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 6, 2002 194 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies York City as a rather improbable model for Barcelona, it is often in ways that replicate and naturalize the sleek surface of a newly sanitized, increasingly homogenized , hyper-commercialized, quasiDisneyfied , globalized place. Barcelona's beauty, its vigor and verve, is not the whole picture, in no small measure because the whole picture cannot but be fractured, shot through with something less than beautiful, other than beautiful, something that disrupts, complicates, and arguably alters the very sense, or knowledge, of the beautiful. The five essays assembled here, disciplinarily different as they are, present Barcelona, however beautiful, by way of the problem of the visual and the visible, still bound to the problem of the known and knowable. For Josep Miquel Sobrer, the interplays between Antoni Gaudi's still unfinished Sagrada Familia and such symbolically laden mountains as Montserrat at once ground the city in a traditionalist , inward-focused Catalan nationalism and mobilize it internationally, providing visitors, both actual and potential, with a cleatly identifiable image of the city. Sobrer follows the history of the temple's construction, from before Gaudi (Francisco de Paula del Villar y Lozano) to after him (Josep Maria Subirachs), and in so doing partially retraces the city's, and the country 's, history. Surrounded by masses of tourists, large climate-controlled buses, and sidewalk stands peddling miniature versions of the building, the Sagrada Familia at times seems to acquire the characteristics of an oversized trinket, a massive piece of merchandise with few appreciable links to such lofty, fraught ideals as God and country. But as Sobrer rightly insists, the "laic success" of the building "stands in some sort of tension with its putported religious intent, which was one of expiation or atonement for societal sins." Gaudi's messianic Catholicism, glossed over by touristic projections and avantThe Plan Cerda, 1859. Brad Epps 195 garde appropriations, continues to imprint , however weakly, the structure. Opposition to the construction of the Sagrada Familia may presently...