Reading group: From the Barrio Chino to the Raval. Is there an aesthetic of the lower depths of Barcelona? Coordinated by Joan M. Gual
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the history of the Raval – formerly known as the Barrio Chino or the Fifth District – is the history of a great many people who have lived, shared or simply passed through this area during that period. It is also the history of its numerous cultural representations produced to this day. When Paco Villar said in his official chronicle that the Barrio Chino died in 1987, he was contrasting a specific idea of the area with the urban planning that had by then already been approved and was beginning to be carried out prior to the 1992 Olympic Games. The Barrio Chino began, officially, when the journalist Paco Madrid gave it this name in the magazine El Escándalo during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
The Barrio Chino is associated with the Republic (through the Macià Plan created by GATCPAC), the Franco era, the democratic Transition and the pre-Olympics Barcelona of heroin, through a prolific cultural production that has represented it over the years. Non-fiction images, literature and the press have played a fundamental role in justifying the urban transformations that took place, firstly due to the demands of those living there and later to the policies of the town planning department at Barcelona City Council, led by Oriol Bohigas from 1984 to 1992. The idea of 'revitalising the city centre and monumentalising the periphery' served, among other things, to turn the Barrio Chino into the Raval, and moreover, to clean up an area that had been the subject of many frustrated urban plans since the mid-nineteenth century.
The cultural regeneration of the area, the construction of cultural institutions to change its profile in the nineties, together with the massive influx of immigrants and the opening of the Rambla del Raval, with the subsequent displacement of people who lived in the streets formerly occupied by it, have been the subject of many research projects, artistic productions and evaluations, which we can now observe through the lens of José Luís Guerín: 'Changes in the urban landscape mean changes in the human landscape'; and the writer Zola: 'Urban transformation equals moral transformation.'
Through carefully selected texts, this reading group will investigate the relation between myth and metropolis in the city of Barcelona, as well as the dynamics of rupture and continuity between two periods in an area that, despite its change of name and physiognomy, continues to be newsworthy due to the stigmas that have historically plagued it, such as sex workers in the streets, and to the abundant cultural products reflecting on the moral geography of Barcelona.
Can we talk about the aesthetics of the lower depths? If the answer is yes: How has the Raval (or the Barrio Chino or Fifth District) contributed to it?
Programme
Mondays 4, 11, 18 and 25 March and 8 and 15 April, from 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm
4 March
SESSION 1: The transformation of the Barrio Chino in the Cinema
By Joan Miquel Gual
Source material: Raval l'últim esglaó, 30 min. documentary.
http://www.tv3.cat/videos/1460729
11 March
SESSION 2: Childhood in the Barrio Chino
By Gary W. McDonogh
Text: Sin la sonrisa de Dios, 1951. Chapter 1 (pp. 7–38), José Antonio de la Loma
18 March
SESSION 3: Barrio Chino por bulerías. Flamenco as a sound track
By Montse Madridejos
Text: Intermedio pintoresco. Adolfo Bueso, Recuerdos de un cenetista, vol II
25 March
SESSION 4: The hidden camera and sex workers
Speaker: Joan M. Gual
Text: Introduction to the catalogue El Carrer. Joan Colom a la Sala Aixelà, Jorge Ribalta
8 April
SESSION 5: A transformist neighbourhood. Carnival in the Barrio Chino
By Celia Marín
Text: Carnaval i Revolució Ramon Rucabado, published in Catalunya Social, 2–3, 1935
15 April
SESSION 6: A Barrio Chino without the Chinese. Being a foreigner in the Raval
By Miquel Fernández
Text: Guia Secreta de Barcelona. Josep Maria Carandell
* All reading material will be provided through Dropbox
SPEAKERS
Miquel Fernández is a Doctor in Social Anthropology and Masters in Criminology and Sociology of Law, Universitat de Barcelona (UB). Degree and Masters in Sociology and Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. His latest research deals in symbolic and systemic violence with various articles on the urban transformation and alteration of Barcelona's Raval. (The Invention of Public Space as a Territory for Exception. The case of Barcelona's Barrio Chino). He is a member of GRECS (Research Group on Exclusion and Social Control), and Professor of Anthropology at the Universitat de Barcelona.
Joan M. Gual is a Member of the Universidad Nómada, at the Observatorio Metropolitano de Barcelona, and of the Fundación de los Comunes. Degree in Audiovisual Communication, Universidad de Málaga, and Masters in Creative Documentaries, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis La ciutat del mal: una història del barri del Raval a la imatge de no ficció (1898–2012).
Montse Madridejos was Born in Barcelona, 1972. IT Engineer and Doctor in the History of Music from the Universitat de Barcelona. She studied Flamenco guitar at the Conservatori del Liceu, Barcelona. She writes essays and lectures on the history of Flamenco in Barcelona and Catalonia. Her main subjects of interest are Carmen Amaya, the Borrull family, Lola Cabello and Flamenco shows and clubs in Barcelona. She has written and designed all the contents of the webpage www.historiasdeflamenco.com. Flamenco en la Barcelona de la Exposición Internacional (1929–1930) is the title of her doctoral thesis and first book published by Edicions Bellaterra.
Celia Marín Vega is an architect and Associate Professor in the Department of Architectural Composition at the Escuela de Arquitectura de Barcelona UPC, where she teaches Introduction to Architecture Theory, and Architecture and the City in the Cinema, together with Antonio Pizza. She has contributed to many exhibitions on modern architecture as a researcher for museums such as MUHBA, MNCARS, IVAM and the Picasso Museum, Barcelona. At present she is working on her doctoral thesis under José Lahuerta on the subject of the Barrio Chino in the 1920s and thirties.
Gary W. McDonogh (Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, USA)is a doctor in Anthropology from The Johns Hopkins University. Professor of Urbanism at Bryn Mawr College. He has published several studies on Barcelona – on the subjects of class, urban images and civic culture – such as Good Families of Barcelona, 1992, and various essays on the Raval. He has also published books on race and religion in the south of the USA, Hong Kong and Ibero-American globalisation. At present he is working on global Chinatowns – real and metaphoric – based on research in North and South America, Asia, Australia, Africa and Europe.
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