English Texts

Franco: ‘What is in the sun / above the cemetery / in
Barcelona? // Nothing, but between the Andalusian, /
between the Andalusian and the sun/ there is an old
link. // His soul has departed from him / and he has
come to live/ beneath the cemetery in Barcelona. //
A soul can become Castilian // and a body can remain
Andalusian / beneath the same sun! // They say that
African souls / have turned white, // and not by the
will of the Lord. / (But no Lord of Barcelona/ going
to Andalusia / has had a black soul). // Before
becoming Castilian / the soul must learn Catalan / in
an Andalusian body. // Happy then he who learns
Walloon, / because his body is in the sun, / in the great
sun of the world. // But here one goes from sun to
sun, / and between the Catalan and the Andalusian
/ there is no more than the eye of the Castilian. // Yes,
between the Andalusian and the Frenchman / is the
sun of suns, / not the sun of a cemetery. // If he speaks
Castilian, / learning Catalan in the meantime, // he
gives his soul for a few pesetas. / Not in exchange
for reason / like the Arab or the black / in the sun of
Lille or Pigalle. // A hut for a soul, / a heap of hovels
for a heap of souls, / a little fire lit under the sun. // Sun
of Catalonia! / Little fire of Andalusia! / Garrotte of
Castile! // Land of Spain, / what do you expect under
the sun / which is no more than sun? // A journey of a
thousand hours / to find a cemetery / and a heap of
huts. // You have to come to Spain / to see the silence
/ of a man who is only a man.’
Now back to Ciudad Badía. How can our hands not
shake when we handle these tools in Ciudad Badía
and do not want to take the name of Pasolini in vain?
In 1968 the Italian poet visited the city of Turin. As
the embodiment of the true ‘Civitas Dei’ of industrial
capitalism – ‘but nobody has ever been in a “Civitas
Dei” and we have been in Turin,’ Pasolini wrote – the
film-maker pondered the work of the artist in the modern
city: ‘Because there are existential, immediate, specific
data of “behaviour in behaviour” of which, it seems,
sociology cannot “speak”. Is it not then the artist’s task
to “speak” of these things which sociology excludes
from itself, in practical terms, “speak” about survivals?
(Survivals of the peasant world, of the provincial
bourgeoisie who liked to give a craft flavour to their
first industries, of the southern way of life, etc. etc.)
If that were the mission of an artist in Turin, that is,
to return confusion and uncertainty to the inhabitants
of an industrial city whom the sociologists tend to
sketch cleanly and safely, then it must be said that
a writer’s instinctive “realism”, with the touch of the
non-ideological and existential that implies, is always
undoubtedly destined to fight “avant-garde battles”.
Battles in which, when all is said and done, the true
massacres take place. The false artists, the so-called
fashionable artists, volunteers in the “avant-garde
battles”, in fact only fight lounge duels and virtuosities
where there is never a single casualty.’
With all due respect, all that remains is for us to
be modest so as not to lose our lives. We cannot allow
ourselves to be cowed by the power Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Modestly, all we can do is to offer a few approaches,
perhaps inappropriate to a ‘realist writer’ but no doubt
destined to bring confusion and uncertainty to the
inhabitants of The Empty City.
A news item from 1936 which appears in Terrassa
1936-1939. Tres anys difícils de guerra civil by Baltasar
Ragon (‘A group of militiamen turn up at the homes
of nearly all the photographers in the city and confiscate
all the negatives of young men’) leads us to publish
a set of seven postcards with which to reconstruct a
‘racial’ map of the citizens. They are all photographs
confiscated one way or another in Ciudad Badía. In
The Postcards we act like a photo booth. But the nub
of the question is in the dispatch, in the posting of those
postcards. The lines of those mails trace a map, a
cartography that comments ironically on the map of
races, the books of mixtures, the tables of ethnic groups:
Spanish, Poles, non-Gypsies… Pasolini generally liked
to use those words.
Around the independentist journey of Badia del
Vallès, a second work, Independence, is constructed.
We can say that from the project in 1964 to achieving
independence as a town, the social community of
Badia has strengthened its ties through neighbourhood
struggle, in the demands for improvements in living
conditions, in recognition of their right to live in occupied
housing and to refurbish the apartments that had
been legally distributed among them, to the struggles
for achieving independence as a town. At those
moments of struggle the conflict of identities and
sovereignties have been made explicit on more than
one occasion: the residents’ grouping around different
regional origins, the occupation of dwellings by a group
of citizens mostly of Gypsy origin, the Catalanisation
policies implemented after the Catalan government
gave the independence of the town its blessing, etc.
Some texts by Pasolini have been constructed with an
alphabet of images, as he himself wanted, which come
from these ‘cycles’ of struggle.
We should not infer the meaning of these lines too
much to understand our proposal for the circulation of
images marking the Pasolini entry in F.X. Archive. It is
evident that the conflict between sovereignty and
subject is resolved for Pasolini around the paradoxes
of identity. The dance of the Moor who tears down and
returns the figure to sacred ground is circulated as
the reverse of different laws that aspire to being text –
in the sense of the religions of the Book – of different
sovereignties. From the Declaration of the Rights of Man
to the Founding Deed of Badia. With some urgency, the
Spanish constitution and the version of the statute of
Catalonia that is being debated are there too. Also,
following Pasolini, we have added a deed of rights that
is circulating on the internet and whose beneficiaries,
paradoxically, are the illegal immigrants.
Ute Meta Bauer
Files was a project by Octavio Zaya for the Museo de
Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC). There
was something competition-like about the idea. Thirty
or so art curators were each invited to select three or
four artists whose work they considered representative
of the current scene. Of course it was a promotional
project for the new museum, which opted for the
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