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increasing channelling of all our cities and this UR-
VANITAS that refers to many things, but wants to reach
the primary UR, that ur we so easily turn into urine,
describing it as a VANITAS, an original void on which
the cornucopia of the city is later developed. This
is also a geographical idea of the city that had been
pursuing me since those attempts ‘to give Capital
a geographical character’. Indeed, the transformation
of the cornucopia into vanitas is just a matter of
time. The coat of arms of Valencia springs to mind, but
how many cities are there that do not sell themselves
as a tempting cornucopia? Cities are the world where
there is everything, the great table of the capitalist
lunch. The rotten apple, the UR-VANITAS understood
as an irreversible framework that conditions the
Quantity of Labour on which the modern city is founded
for ever.
Walter Benjamin emphasised like no other Marxist
the religious condition of Capitalism, a religion that
depoliticises the life of the modern city around its
swindles, hides its intention to construct the non-polis,
the non-city we live in. Materialism would be no
more than a disenchantment, a demonstration of the
world in the face of superstition. The function of the
quotation in the Das Passagen-Werk is none other than
the demolition of the great spectacle of the modern
capitalist city grain by grain. And so in our Printer for
Capital, The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret
Thereof, a way of bringing a theoretical construction,
a ghost story to earth. The point is to set up a subtracting
machine which paradoxically multiplies its own
material by seven. When we take away the sequence
of our film shot by shot and drag each image to the
weight of paper and ink, gram by gram, taking power
from the spectre, dragging it to its condition as matter.
Pasolini
The comment by the official in the town hall ran as
follows: ‘A short time ago Adigsa, the body responsible
for administering subsidised housing in Badia, had
to reclaim an apartment because the owners had
rented it illegally to a family of Rumanians. It turns out
that since the whole of Badia consists of subsidised
housing, the apartments cannot be sold or let except
through a transfer of ownership supervised by Adigsa.
This means that a town consisting of many diverse
groups of immigrants (symbolised by the swallow flying
in the city’s emblem) is now closed to them, while
the occupancy of their houses cannot be transferred.’
We then made a study of some statistics from the Badia
del Vallès census, in the course of which we went
to see an old administrator whose working life had
been spent in the old offices of Barcelona provincial
council, the town council, and Adigsa. Now it seemed
he was in some local government service. It had been
he who originally had the idea of baptising Badia’s
schools and training centres with the names of regional
dances: sardana, seguidilla, jota, muñeira. We looked
into his game, which had something to do with the
peninsular names of the topography of Badia, and
we ended up asking him about his origins, for although
he spoke Catalan, a certain intonation led us to guess
that he came from elsewhere. He told us he was
from Teruel, from Aguilar de Alfambra. Basically,
I was the only one to get the joke that accompanied
his certificate of origin. That was how the Pasolini entry
came to enlighten our work, even though many claimed
that this was obvious and necessary when it came
to drawing a profile of any city on the periphery.
In F.X. Archive the Pasolini entry points to a sequence
from the film El derrumbamiento del Ejército Rojo,
edited in 1938 by Antonio Galvache as propaganda
for the nationalist army. The same images can be
found in Noticiero Español, though the origin of the filming
remains unclear. In this sequence we see a group of
Moorish soldiers who belonged to the colonial regiments
recruited by the fascist army among the people of
Morocco. From the door of a chapel another Moor
comes out, smiling and bearing the figure of a saint
(St Anthony apparently) and shows it to his officer,
who orders him to return it. Both the soldier coming
out of the chapel and the other officer are trying not
to spoil the shot so that it will clearly pick out the figure
of the saint. The original film has lost its soundtrack,
so we do not know the exact intentions of the sequence.
It appears at the end of a series of montages that
identify the monuments and landscapes around Teruel
with the homelands of the Moroccan troops. And so
the iconoclastic, or perhaps iconodulic, scene of the
saint seems to interrupt that chain of images. Another
problem is the location of the chapel. The Noticiero
Español contains items from the Sarrión zone, also in
the surroundings of Teruel, but the story is in contradiction
with the earlier film, although they were both made in
1938. Teruel, the alternative title for El derrumbamiento
del Ejército Rojo, ends precisely with the taking of the
city and focuses on the so-called Battle of Alfambra.
The monumental chain we were talking about links the
common etymology of the word with ‘al-hambra’,
meaning ‘red castle’ in Arabic. The Alfambra area is
marked by a Mudejar architecture with orange tones,
which are likened to the castle in Granada. An interview
with Antonio Galvache, the director of the film, in Vértice
magazine and the knowledge gleaned in the course
of the conversation with the paloteado from Aguilar,
lead us to conclude that the action takes place in the
chapel of Santo Cristo de Aguilar del Alfambra and
that the paloteado alluded to is none other than the
local dance. The image matches the old one of St
Benedict – some people also say St Anthony – whose
relics were kept there and the little we see of the door
of the chapel in the film vaguely matches forms we
can recognise in its present state. The passage of time
and most of all the work of the restorers makes it
difficult to be more precise. What does interest us is
the joke this held for Galvache, since in the context of
a propaganda film we cannot speak of any excess
of culture.
The dance of Aguilar del Alfambra is an old one,
and includes drama and music. Beneath the structure
of a dialectical combat between enemies – angels
and demons, Moors and Christians, etc. – historical
references and contemporary events are put into verse,
a kind of counter chronicle, in the style of the carnival
746 English Texts