Contesting the capital of culture in Antonio Muñoz Molina's Los misterios de Madrid

This essay examines Antonio Muñoz Molina´s use of the Gothic mode and the misterio genre to destabilize Madrid's image as a politicized symbol of cultural modernity in his 1992 novel Los misterios de Madrid. The novel was a return to the form and function of the nineteenth-century urban mystery novel. The year 1992 was one of celebrations throughout Spain, and Madrid was designated the 1992 European Capital of Culture (ECOC). The ECOC title was meant to signal Spain's graduation to democratic modernity and its new identity as a European capital. Madrid of Muñoz Molina contests this politicization of Madrid´s identity by gothicizing the capital. This Madrid is enigmatic and threatening, and it is the home of the conspiracies that undermine the capital's new image. In a year that celebrated Madrid's entree into European modernity, Muñoz Molina uses nineteenth-century literary modes to question Madrid's success story.     

Against the Grid: The Cultural Emergence of Villas Miseria in Buenos Aires

This article traces how poverty emerged culturally in mid-century Buenos Aires. It does so by examining two contrasting models: (1) the state’s, revealed in the plans it prepared for the eradication of villas miseria (the local term for slums), (2) that of a corpus of cultural objects depicting slums between 1957 and 1963. My basic claim is that the politically motivated conceptual erasure of the slum informed its aesthetic representation. In particular, I look at Bernardo Verbitsky’s novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957), and Antonio Berni’s series of multimedia collages focused on the fictional character of Juanito Laguna (1958–1978). As my essay shows, each of these works responds to the state plans to eradicate slums. Each takes up the state’s idea of the slum as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, but inserts into this plane an excess of materiality. By looking at the shared forms of these objects, I describe how culture came to place the slum within the city’s regular grid, interrupting the linearity imagined by the state. Such a gesture will ultimately have the consequence of turning poverty into something absolutely consumable.     

Moreno y Escandón’s Plan geográphico del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá, 1772

The extent to which Francisco Antonio Moreno y Escandón’s plan of the Viceroyalty of Santafé sparked a revival of cartographical activity has hitherto been overlooked. The Viceroyalty of Santafé was created as a major unit in the Spanish Empire in 1739 and included the present-day countries of Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Panama. Moreno, a high-standing Creole functionary, mapped the region in 1772 in the context of its administrative organization. By drawing attention to Moreno’s official map, I hope to encourage the study of late-colonial and early-republican cartography of the northwestern part of the former Spanish-American dominion and the present-day constituent republics.     

Rehabilitation Techniques for Walls during the 18th Century in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia)

ABSTRACT

Although it may be thought that the rehabilitation of historical structures is a concern of modern engineering, studies on intervention processes from the past allow us to understand that this is a work carried out frequently and sometimes as a solution to low budgets for the construction of new buildings, or the need to offer quick practical solutions. The objective of this article is to show the way in which during the second half of the 18th century several important architectural and structural rehabilitation works were carried out in the walls of Cartagena de Indias, in view of the damage caused by the enemy attacks to the city as well as continuous impact by nature. By making use of primary sources (plans and original reports), the way in which two of the interventions were executed can be reconstructed: one on the Muralla Real, and another on the San José bastion, gathering information that helps explain their current state of conservation.