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Cartographies of invisible cities

A programme of itineraries around Barcelona and its limits through literature, thought, urbanism and anthropology

Where does the city begin and end? What is my relation to those “paths of desire” that are not marked on the map? How can we read the territory, as though it were a novel to be interpreted through its symbolism and its scars?

In his famous theatrical manifesto, playwright José Sanchis Sinisterra wrote “borders are not perceived from the viewpoint of border areas”. And with this idea of going where the city blurs its centrality, accompanied by the reading of authors such as Francisco Candel and Javier Pérez Andújar, among others, we present a series of walks through spaces that allow us to resignify memory, urbanity, and the direct relationship between democracy and landscape.

Just as there is a literature that explores its very limits, the walker wants to expand the cartographies that have been offered to them by officiality or propaganda. Traversing these spaces that are mostly invisible to ordinary urban photography allows us to broaden our perspective and change points of view for thinking, feeling and living the city. As the parents of psychogeography did, these routes through invisible cities see the act of walking as the process of creating maps and, therefore, new forms of relationship—and unexpected links—between the space and time we inhabit.

 

Programme curated by Albert Lladó

Previous activities

Welcome to Barcelona

A walk with Albert Lladó

Water snakes

A walk with Sitesize (Elvira Pujol Masip and Joan Vila Puig)

Besòs, gateway and border

A walk with Jordi Gol

City (of the irrigation channel) of the Counts

A walk with Núria Martínez-Vernis

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Where the city changes its name

A walk with Jordi Corominas i Julián