Page 169 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

vehicles carrying yet again all the plastic objects, the uniforms, the scale-models... The giant doll somehow functions like an allegiance-eliciting mechanism, in the manner of team mascots for sports fans or the idols in a pagan celebrations. It also reminds us of the Spanish folk tradition of festival masks, specifically Los Gigantes y Cabezudos, or giants and big heads,23 like the figures of the king and the queen that Joan Miró and Joan Baixas turned into gigantic puppets in Mori el Merma, a piece of experimental theatre they staged in 1978. Baixas’ and Miro’s work was a reinterpretation of Jarry’s Ubu Roi meant as a celebration of Franco’s death and the end of a repressive dictatorship, but here the oversized figure is suspended in sneering ambiguity, even pataphysical, sticking its tongue out in childish gigantism. Its movements and the way it is paraded also remind us of that period, right after the Soviet Revolution, when street parades in Russia mixed the language of the avant-garde with popular referents, one of those periods of hybridisation in cultural production, of precarious balance between high culture and its vernacular translation, so fundamental to Colomer’s aesthetic.
The puppet’s destination is Barcelona’s Superilla (“Super-island”), an experiment in urban planning recently launched by the City Council in the post-industrial district of Poble Nou. The plan takes advantage of the fact that blocks of buildings in the Eixample area are arranged into grid patterns in order to merge contiguous areas into super-blocks,24 creating pedestrian spaces overlaying the pre-existing street grid. The city, as the space of both the “social body” and the individual bodies that add up to form the collectivity, is utopia’s foundational ground. The social choreography in ¡Únete! Join Us! Is – like all utopias – an aberrant by-product of the real25 governed by the principles of cognitive estrangement.26 The empty cityscape, with speculative real-estate development in Barcelona’s post-industrial quarters in the background, functions as a new environment with an enhanced sense of anticipation.
At the Superilla the group stops to carry out a new collective action. Using a space with terraced seats, dancer and bank-clerk Anita Deb launches into a performance before another group of followers sitting opposite her, clad in Athens and Nashville university apparel. She motions from her position, and they mirror her movements as she spins a soundless dance that induces yet another cross-cultural displacement within the
23 Traditional oversized papier maché figures representing visual satires of characters, popular in local festivals throughout Spain
[Translator’s note].
ThE COMING CITIzENRY MANUEL SEGADE
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24 The plan drew the attention of the New York Times: https://mobile.nytimes. com/2016/10/02/nyregion/ what-new-york-can-learn-from- barcelonas-superblocks.html [Accessed 26 March 2017 21:33]
25 Jameson, op. cit., p. 15.
26 Darko Suvin,
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, Chapter 1.