TAKING TO THE STREETS
An audiotour through Barcelona's underground scene of the 1970s
This audiotour sets out to rethink certain areas of Barcelona through their aesthetic and cultural expressions. In particular, it reflects on how the body and certain ways of occupying space transformed the environment and generated enclaves of politicization that have had an impact on architecture and the public sphere in the city. To this end, an audiotour has been put together, connecting interviews and the testimony of some of the agents and protagonists of the period with key events and places, in order to generate a political and poetic topography of the Barcelona of the seventies.
This audiotour will take us to some of the key places where people gathered, discussed and engaged in independent, collective production during the seventies. Bars, studios, apartments and other improvised venues where political debate took place, or where small work communes created fanzines and magazines like “El Rrollo Enmascarado” and “Ajoblanco”. This is the underground, libertarian, homosexual story of Barcelona during the last days of Franco’s dictatorship and the ‘transition-transaction’ (as Bernat Muniesa called it), a time when the streets were a stage for celebrations, for the people, and for politics.
Daniel Gasol
Cultural worker, researched and artist Daniel Gasol describes himself as a “faggot child of the proletariat and cultural worker,” not (just) to provoke a response, but as a carefully calibrated strategy, fully aware that it immediately highlights the class privilege that informs any contemporary artistic practice and possibility of being. In this podcast, makes an against-the-grain reading of Spain’s Vagrancy Law (1933-1970) and Law of Social Danger (1970-1995) through the prism of class, in which he reviews literature and criminal records from the National Archive of Catalonia in order to show the criminalisation of the underprivileged classes and of the proletarian body.
El Palomar
In FONS AUDIO #53 El Palomar tell us about their work in the MACBA collection Not Only Homophiles Are Homosexual, but Also Those Blinded by the Lost Phallus, a project in which they take up an unfinished, unproduced script by essayist and anthropologist Alberto Cardín and decide to make the film by their own means. In the course of rereading (and rewriting) Cardín’s cinematic vision, and through a process of immersion and meticulous research into its immediate context and background, El Palomar reconstruct a chapter in our history of sexual dissent, which is today still full of gaps and absences. Chief among them, Alberto Cardín.
Manuel Asensi
Interview with Manuel Asensi, co-director of the Independent Studies Programme (PEI 2006).