The spatial turn in the humanities has given way to a focal shift from time and history over spatiality. Scholars such as Lefebvre, Sassen, or Harvey have questioned dominant presuppositions about space as a fixed, empty container in which actions and relationships unfold. Following Lefebvre, we regard space as a socially produced process in which social relations develop alongside material space. Instead of focusing on public spaces as others have done, this session follows up the resurgence of interest in literary and cultural spatial criticism by turning our attention to disregarded private, yet social, sites.
Our panel provides four case studies illustrating key loci to Barcelona’s modernity: the club, the restaurant, and the rooftop; all of which, despite their private nature, act as centers of sociability. Rather than confined space, these locations transfer social dynamics from/to the street in ways that blur dichotomies such as private/public or interiority/exteriority. They become conflictual, political processes in which citizens intervene to produce their own space.
To ensure ample discussion, our four speakers, affiliated members of the North American Catalan Society, will limit their interventions to 12 minutes. Òscar Ferrer will start by exploring how a social club in Barcelona’s turn-of-the-century bears traces of the class conflict inherent to its modern foundations. In his talk, Ferrer shows how the private gentlemen club Círculo del Liceo, flagship social space of the Catalan bourgeoisie, paradoxically became a place to socialize among themselves and to eschew socialization with the rest of the city. The club served as a platform from which the bourgeoisie successfully self-isolated and enforced their ideals upon an industrial Barcelona; even if subjugated, Ferrer argues, contiguous social spaces such as blue-collar societies resisted their impositions.
Laura Menéndez will take the discussion to Barcelona’s working-class homes of the 1960s as collective spaces for contesting Franco’s dictatorship repression through everyday practices and art. She shows how Carme Garcia’s photographs from her rooftop not only transgress women’s seclusion by photography’s very professional activity but also in the social interactions that gravitate around the camera and its capturing techniques. Similarly, Menéndez argues, the horizontal search for a piano across rooftops in Vázquez Montalbán’s novel The Pianist enables breakout from domestic confines. She maintains that inhabitants challenge predetermined space through transgressions that, from the rooftop, crack and expand the enclosing walls of the house.
Eloi Grasset will carry Montalbán’s readings over to the 1970s by focusing on restaurants as places where the public and private collide. Because of its hybrid condition, the public esteem restaurants hold is constrained by people’s collective imagination and fluctuating symbolic values. Considering the link between culture, politics, and identity promoted in Catalonia during the democratic transition, Grasset explores how processes of social and cultural redetermination impacted local gastronomic narratives. Taking as a case study Montalbán's early essays on Catalan cuisine and the references to restaurants appearing in his works, he analyzes how a process of cultural reterritorialization transfigured Barcelona’s gastronomic landscape.
Finally, Isaias Fanlo will take us to contemporary rooftops through a discussion of cultural practices from a queer theoretical approach. Fanlo will focus on performance arts to address how the 2008 crisis shaped civic discourses, as well as the venues they were performed in. Fanlo tackles the complex intersection between spaces, scenic arts, and citizenship in the case study of Barcelona’s festival Terrats en Cultura, where rooftops allow queer genres and genders to emerge as performative beings for a nation in crisis. Fanlo argues that both performative works and spaces contest traditional theatrical paradigms and articulate alternative discourses on cultural resistance for post-crisis Spain.
This panel engages with timely critical questions as the effects of globalization and ongoing crises challenge our current urban experiences. The liminal cases analyzed draw alternative cartographies of what it means to inhabit a city. Barcelona, with its history of political turmoil, social protest, and grassroots art, offers a privileged milieu from which to rethink on a global scale the modern production of space.