Wednesday 26 November 2014
Barcelona, from Textiles to Technology: The Development of a Great City III
Speakers: Olivia Muñoz-Rojas (Univ. Westminster), Claudie Herrou (Paris 13 Univ.) and Michael Richards (Univ. West England)
With the participation of Antoni Vives
Chair: Paul Preston
Time: 17 h.
Place: LSE, Portugal Street, Cowdray House, 1st floor, Seminar Room 1.11
Poster
PowerPoint Presentations by Olivia Muñoz-Rojas and Michael Richards
With the collaboration of:
This conference is the third of a series of events on the history of Barcelona from the nineteenth century to the present day.
Programme:
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17 h. Welcome by Prof. Paul Preston and Antoni Vives (Deputy Mayor for Urban Habitat, Barcelona City Council)
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17.10 Dr. Olivia Muñoz-Rojas (University of Westminster)
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18 h. Screening of The Long Journey towards Anger (1969, Spain, 26 min). In Spanish. Presented by Dr. Claudie Herrou (Paris 13 University)
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18.30 h. Dr. Michael Richards (University of the West of England)
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19.30 h. Debate
Abstracts:
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Interrupted continuity: The reconstruction of Barcelona's old city centre in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, by Dr. Olivia Muñoz-Rojas
This talk discussed the reconstruction of Barcelona’s old city centre in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War with a focus on three aspects: practice and discourse, funding, and public reactions to the works. Relentlessly bombed by the rebels, the ciutat vella, especially the area around the cathedral, was in significantly bad shape at the end of the conflict, its reconstruction becoming a priority for the new city council. Incidentally, there already existed plans to redevelop the area prior to the civil war, the last one approved by the Republican city council. In spite of the Franco regime’s objective of breaking with the immediate Republican past, the plan was simply resumed, although initially wrapped in a strong Falangist narrative. Arguably, it was less costly and time-consuming to disguise an existing plan in a different narrative than to produce a new one, and to keep some of the relevant pre-war staff in place. Following this, the talk addressed the difficulties for the city council to obtain funding for the works, given the regime’s prioritisation of rural reconstruction and the ‘neglect’ of cities other than the capital city. Finally, it examined the written and other public reactions to the transformation of old Barcelona at the time, and the subtle manifestations of Catalanism that may be found in them despite the regime’s censorship.
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The Long Journey towards Anger, directed by Lorenzo Soler
The Long Journey towards Anger is a sobering portrait of poverty and marginalization. The people that feature in the documentary are anonymous immigrants who have abandoned a hardscrabble existence in the rural provinces in an elusive search for a better life in the city. Unable to find affordable housing, the immigrants pile into overcrowded, dilapidated apartments in rundown districts, taking on menial jobs in a construction boom fuelled by the transforming cityscape of a rapidly modernized Barcelona that systematically excludes them. Soler's incisive sense of juxtaposition creates a remarkably complex and textural work from seemingly mundane images. Rapid-fire images of luxury and conspicuous consumption are often contrasted against sobering accounts of exploitation and displacement that reflect the realities of economic polarization. Soler incorporates culturally iconic music to reinforce the cycle of hardship and desolation: the sound of ‘fados’ as a family sleeps in a cramped apartment; Aretha Franklin's ‘Chain of Fools’ punctuating the morning commute to the city; a chorale that accompanies the image of homeless people sleeping on a vacant lot, presumably, new immigrants to the city. Images of the church also feature in Soler’s work, reflecting both figurative rites of passage into a brave new world of constant struggle and ephemeral moments of grace.
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Defeat, Disease, Dissent and Development: Barcelona, from 1938 to the early 1960s, by Dr. Michael Richards
This paper is part of a broader project which moves historiographically away from a fragmented post-civil war chronology and towards a view of the contemporary past in Spain as an ongoing process, exploring continuities and relationships through daily life, social memory, and interactions between state and society. As such, it surveyed the terrain broadly, but with sensitivity to experience at the ‘molecular’ level. The paper looked in turn at the reality and interpretation of Barcelona’s occupation in early 1939, the social conditions emerging in the aftermath in the 1940s, the crystallisation of dissident ideas and coalescence of oppositional groups (particularly as viewed in the general strike of spring 1951), and the contribution of labour migration to Greater Barcelona to social and economic development during the 1950s and 1960s. By using an unusual range of source materials - including medical, police and state party reports, epidemiological and demographic studies, worker priests’ discussions, and oral testimony – it argued that it is possible to construct a more nuanced picture of post-war change in the city than reliance on the various key political ‘moments’ that Francoism permits.
Olivia Muñoz-Rojas
Claudie Herrou
Michael Richards
Left to right: Michael Richards, Olivia Muñoz-Rojas, Paul Preston and Antoni Vives