Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

View film

Paintings, photographs, film scenes, literary descriptions, poetry passages, music videos, and even comic vignettes, among other artistic items, compose a visual imagery of every city. Those representations, far from just capturing reality, help create it, recalling Wilde’s ‘life imitates art far more than art imitates life’. Then, if Art uncovers what had remained unseen, there is an open door for studying what some of those unseens were, are, or have changed, especially from a comprehensive approach to all of them as a visual imagery. From literature to cinema, photography or painting, hundreds of images have loaded Madrid throughout the time with a visual imagery of projective representations that is not fixed, eternal, or immobile. This contribution presents a discursive and mapped cross-cutting study from over three hundred of those images, with a twofold aim: to detect and analyze some echoes between them and to provide a holistic understanding of Madrid’s visual imagery through a spatial display (i.e., cartographical). In doing so, it explains an on-going research about representation of Madrid within the LabPA-CM research project (H2019/HUM-5692), which addresses theoretical, methodological and applied research problems to contribute to the knowledge and conservation of Madrid’s landscape. To what extent Madrid’s current imagery is indebted to these representations? From a methodological perspective, how useful is this digital cartography and its capacity both to grow and to be replicated in other urban contexts?