El codi torbat: De la poesia experimental a l’escriptura conceptual

Abstract

personal and the political which relates to the feminist struggle for power and public visibility. After looking at the photographs by Garcia and Caturla, still limited by the cultural structures of the period, the chapter analyses the more ambitious and innovative work produced by Colita, a member of Barcelona’s Gauche Divine. What I find fascinating in Colita’s work is her use of irony, scrutinized by Sendra through a photograph of two secretaries acting as slaves of the male character of publisher Jorge Herralde (173). Without the complicity of the viewer in activating its irony, this photograph would be complicit with, rather than critical of, patriarchy. Sendra resorts to Donna Haraway’s concept of irony to make sense of this (173), but I would suggest that another way of looking at it would be through Judith Butler’s vindication and re-appropriation of the term “queer,” which has been a tool for discrimination in the dominant culture. A similar re-appropriation can be observed in a 1976 photograph of a demonstration against the criminalization of female adultery with Montserrat Roig and Maruja Torres wearing placards stating “Jo tamb e s oc ad ultera” [I’m an adulterer too]. This photograph is not discussed in the book, but it fits Sendra’s view of Colita’s clever visual irony. Sendra concludes by stressing that the works she studies are “founded on heterogeneity and multi-sensoriality, [and speak] to us about literature and photography not as representations, but as material objects and social agents” (191). She notes that the promising Barcelona of the neighbourhood associations, social movements, and the defiant texts of her corpus does not bear fruit until the twenty-first century, when exhibitions and other collective efforts related to the recovery of popular memory have made the history of the city’s margins less “elusive” (194). It could be argued that Catalan culture expressed in Catalan could have been more visible in Sendra’s monograph as, even under the restrictions imposed by the dictatorship, it voiced its resistance through its different, forbidden, clandestine language. Nevertheless, this a good, perceptive, and insightful book that successfully achieves its goal by seeking and discussing dissent in visual and literary texts of a challenging period.