English Texts

the title of one of the magazines that deployed this
ideological operation. The attempt to rebuild modern
cities in Spain is set in this same conceptual operation
that later on contemporary radicalism – especially
the architectural vanguard – would call postmodern.
A fragment of text by Ángel Gutiérrez Valero for
Archive Cultures about the magazine Reconstrucción
can elaborate significantly on what we have been
saying so far. It is a footnote to the report on the
rebuilding of Belchite and the iconic emphasis placed
on the destruction of the church: ‘The reference to
the church is not gratuitous. It places religiosity in the
vanguard of the discourse, and its reconstruction has
to channel all the forces that operate in the reconquered
territories; the rhetoric does not only show the character
of Catholicism as the engine of the inventive artifice.
Fixing the ruin visually introduces a larger number of
semantic levels into its metamorphosis into a monument,
a task in which sentimental and propagandist
reminiscences take on particular virulence. The icons
of destruction construct the landscape that justifies
the action of the postwar; in their persistence and
conservation the signs that identify those responsible
and describe their actions are deployed. Restricted
to its military dimension, the war is interpreted in
apocalyptic terms; armies are replaced by hordes,
ideals by hatred, victory by destruction. Death does
not symbolise the highest degree of cruelty inherent
to war: even in terms of extermination, one will
always be able to reach an objective, individual
identification; it will be the annihilation of the symbols,
of the common elements that transcend the subject
and identify the collective. Compiled in the definition
of the Devastated Regions mission, these aspects
are especially significant in their drafting, since the
omission of the word – if not the concept – heritage
is symptomatic. This rhetorical resource used in the
normative text in relation to the use of the images
of the ruins of the church of Belchite eliminates any
ambiguity that might emerge from the use of the word
heritage, especially its possible identification with
an administrative figure. Its omission replaces the
material consideration – edification, architecture – of
the goods with a concept with symbolic weight such
as representation – an aspect that goes beyond its
regulation or categorisation – in a statement that
transcends mere physicality, a condition heightened
by the assimilation on a single level of Christianity
and Spanishness, concepts that are the object of this
representation.’
The analysis continues and concludes that this
move towards representation ends up making
Reconstrucción a tourist magazine, since the values
it wished to emphasise ended in that theatrical
space where the city ceases to be useful for most of
the citizens and becomes just a stage set, with the
sole possibility of representing. A magazine that turned
the traditional values of ‘Spanish Catholicism’ into
tourist typification. Perhaps the natural peculiarity
of the Spanish case, with the triumph of the nationalfascists,
might make us think for a moment that the
transformation emerging from the pages of
Reconstrucción is an exception to the rule, from
‘redemption’ to the ‘picturesque’. We may say that
this exaggeration in terms is special and we have
to thank the ideological transparency with which this
metamorphosis is offered to us. But if we return for
a moment to Agamben’s text we shall confirm that
what happens here is not so different from what was
happening at that time in the reconstruction of
Europe after the Second World War, although the terms
‘sacred redemption’ and ‘picturesque scene’ are far
more nuanced. The change takes place in the sphere
of the transformation of capitalist culture towards
post-Fordism, the third industrialisation, the information
society or whatever you like to call it.
As Juan José Lahuerta has rightly pointed out, it is
in this ideological framework that we must understand
the design and construction of the Ciudad Badía housing
estate, its particular orography in the shape of the
Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish Iberian street names.
Beyond any chance events, which no doubt helped
this construct to be more than an exemplary incident,
the history of forms will thus allow us to approach the
lessons Badia del Vallès has to offer us universally.
For all those reasons we turn to this set of entries
in the general thesaurus of F.X. Archive.
The kinship which the play of inclusions and
exclusions of the archive – both the Files and the
F.X. Archive projects – establishes between the priestly
caste and the new art curators or commissars is, of
course, a mere game and the list of names should be
understood as a generality in which exceptions will
certainly abound. One of them is represented by the
entry Ute Meta Bauer, which is precisely what we are
trying to elucidate. Exceptions to the rule in the most
literal sense of the word exceptional since, as we
shall see, an approach to the Ute Meta Bauer field
will be most productive for the development of what
we have been saying so far.
I have to say that the choice of the Ute Meta Bauer
entry for the Empty City project is based on a more
incidental consideration, since when we located the
names of Bartolomé M.U. and Uberto M.B., two cousins
who had worked out sentences in Alcalá de Henares
prison between 1939 and 1941, in the first census of
the inhabitants of Ciudad Badía, the nexus required
for our investigation was established. Let us remember
that the photograph that gives rise to the Ute Meta
Bauer entry bears the following caption: ‘20-9-1939.
Alcalá de Henares. Madrid. In the Alcalá de Henares
reformatory 300 prisoners are working out their
sentence. In the image, some of them are making
wooden crosses, in high demand by industrialists, in
a section of the carpentry workshop.’ We may suppose
that Bartolomé or Uberto are among the prisoners
Verdugo photographed in 1939, but our investigation
has not gone that far. The photographer Antonio Verdugo
worked for Cifra Gráfica, a Spanish graphic information
agency founded by Vicente Gallego during the civil
war as a section of EFE. The name is an acronym of
Crónicas, Informaciones, Fotografías y Reportajes de
Actualidad. Between January and April 1939 it focused
on the graphic coverage of the war and its images
were published in the foreign press and the Spanish
newspapers Faro de Vigo, ABC (Seville), Sur (Málaga),
Noticiero (Zaragoza), Hierro (Bilbao) and Alerta
(Santander). The first photographers of the agency
English Texts 757