Barcelona is a difficult city to film, to translate into images. There is nothing more complicated than to give form to the literary works by Marsé, Montalbán or Pujols; nothing more difficult than to create an imaginary from the diversity of neighbourhoods superimposed on top of one another around a city that for a long time was a mirror of the tradition of sleazy Mediterranean ports, with the added complication of being squeezed between the mountain and the sea.
Halfway between dreams and the possibility of capturing the roughness of history, comics have always managed to confront fundamental questions about the relation between Barcelona and fiction, from the time when they acted as political fiction, to the years of the Transition and underground culture and the reinvention of the everyday space through such diverse genres as fantastic literature, the noir genre and melodrama.
This reading group wants to reflect on the possibilities of representation for a city that, since the advent of tourism, has been taken over and often substituted by its own commercial image. Equally, it will also explore comics in a wider sense, as an expressive medium with which to construct stories, political discourses and a specific topography for cities.
Register online here: http://bit.ly/WwZqbq
Some of the comics that will be in this group are available at the Library of MACBA.
http://www.facebook.com/events/488299591216418/
Ground floor of MACBA's Study Centre. Limited seating. Free admission
