After the end of the last western European dictatorship, in 1975, Spain started a period of acceleration to democracy. To achieve this, the State started a modernizing project, giving prominence to the audiovisual dispositif as the medium for building a cohesive narrative of contemporary Spain. From the persistence of the Francoist media propaganda to the postmodern representation of the modern city—like the 1992 Olympic Games and the pre-crisis architecture—, the excess of symbolic images has been hegemonic for almost forty years. But during a very specific period, the so-called "Transition" (1975-1982), some alternative audiovisual practices emerged from the art scene and from citizen activism to fill the gap in the dialectics between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives. This talk will analyze some of these practices in Barcelona—be it autonomist cinema, “video guerrillas,” or the free radios movement. In contrast to the strategies of symbolic control exerted by official cultural dispositifs, these examples of "arts of living" operated as “nomadic machines” in the everyday life by activating local tactics in particular instances of time.
Ignasi Gozalo Salellas is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Master in Hispanic Literature (University of Pennsylvania) and a Master in Critical Theory (Macba, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), as well as a Graduate Certificate in Cinema Studies (University of Pennsylvania). He is also Bachelor in Audiovisual Communication (UPF, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Humanities (UOC, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya).
He specializes in contemporary Iberian culture, with a strong interest in the intersection between literary, visual, and spatial arts. His research focuses on theories of the archive and the historical event, as well as on transmediation. He taught in Spain for almost ten years in fields such as visual arts and media. He has given talks at MLA, ACLA, and NEMLA, as well as at international universities in Spain, Mexico, and Russia. Most recently, he has contributed a chapter to the forthcoming book Catalan Cinema: Minority Voices and the New Avant-Garde. He is also a filmmaker with considerable experience in Catalan and Spanish media, and is currently collaborating with the Spanish online media outlet Contexto by producing a series of audiovisual and literary interviews with relevant contemporary thinkers.
