Barcelona, City of Margins by Olga Sendra (review)

Reviewed by: Barcelona, City of Margins by Olga Sendra Ignasi Gozalo-Salellas KEYWORDS Barcelona, Colita, Joan Colom, Paco Candel, Francoism, Multi-Sensoriality, Margins, Public Space sendra, olga. Barcelona, City of Margins. University of Toronto Press, 2022. Olga Sendra's first book, Barcelona, City of Margins (University of Toronto Press), is an important new contribution to the field of Iberian cultural studies. It presents a theoretical and aesthetic corpus on Barcelona in the middle Francoist period [End Page 132] (the 1950s and 60s) through three authors who have only been studied individually: the photographers Joan Colom and Colita and the writer and activist Francisco Candel. Sendra's choice of these three authors seems to be based on how they opened up Barcelona to modernity under Francoism, and their role as a driving force for the rebel consciousness of the following years—later Francoism in the 1970s and the highly studied Spanish transition to democracy ("Transición"). In the introduction, the author provides a clear discussion of her hypothesis: "the margin is not, here, marginalization" (10). By creating a dialogue between Jaime Gil de Biedma's poem "Barcelona ja no és bona" [Barcelona is no longer good] (1966) and Manuel Delgado's anthropological theorizing on the figure of the marginalized, Sendra suggests that margins are potential spaces for dialogue and configuring new voices—not for isolation. The "search for margins" becomes (13), for the author, the space for dissent—understood not as protest or resistance but rather as "oppositional manoeuvres" or "everyday micro-struggles within specific locales" (14). These practices are understood here as moments of visibility, as exercises of the right to the city, following Manuel Castells' new urban sociology of 1970s neighborhood associations. The first chapter, Change of Pace: The Dimensions of the Franco Dictatorship, focuses solely on theoretical thinking regarding the dictatorship's use of space as a tool for ideological control, whereas the following three chapters are monographic studies of the three authors and their work—although the order chosen seems to provide a textual portrait to end with the visual, the chronological order might have provided a more cohesive internal sense. The author first approaches the work of the writer and activist Francisco Candel (Chapter 2, Breaking the Silence: Cultural Mobilization of Francisco Candel). In a wealth of detail, Sendra sets Candel's work in the context of the political and economic events in the regime with regard to urban planning (1953 Regional Plan and the creation of the Ministry for Housing in 1957, among others) and mixes it with the voices of other journalists, such as Huertas Clavería, before looking in depth at Candel's mythical work Donde la ciudad cambia su nombre (1957). Throughout several pages, the author discusses different works by Candel—such as ¡Dios, la que se armó! (1974) and Han matado a un hombre, han roto un paisaje (1967), among others—on the physiognomy and identity of Barcelona's outskirts in dialogue with theories about the city, both at a Marxist theoretical level (Lefebvre, Harvey) and in applied readings of Barcelona by anthropologists like Delgado, writers like Ignasi Riera and urban planners like Jordi Borja. Chapters 3 and 4 address the ability of photography to capture the margins of the Francoist city. Studying first Barcelona's underworld from the end of the 1950s through the work of the self-taught photographer Joan Colom (Chapter 3, Three The Quiet Revolution of Photography: The Barcelona of Joan Colom) and then the brighter 1960s through the work of the pioneering feminine vision of Colita (Chapter 4, A Female City: Colita and the Conceptualization of Barcelona), the two chapters not only complement each other but also offer a productive micro-genealogy of the other Bárcenas over almost 30 years (from the 1950s to 1970s), providing both stronger unity and dimension to these two chapters. However, there are differences between them. The author highlights the "patriarchal perspective" and objectifying gaze in Colom in opposition to Colita's [End Page 133] disruptive one (147). For her, Colom's gaze, close to the Nova Avantguarda (Català Roca, Miserachs, Maspons, Pomés), exceeds its impressionist tradition and integrates Candel's influence by proposing a tension between photographic information...

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