Sara Nadal-Melsió - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Videos by Sara Nadal-Melsió
On the occasion of the exhibition "Debris Field/Notes for a Poem on the Third World/Soleil Nègre ... more On the occasion of the exhibition "Debris Field/Notes for a Poem on the Third World/Soleil Nègre (September 8 - October 4, 2018) at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
11 views
Marina Garcés is a Barcelona-based philosopher and essayist, a professor of philosophy, and a fou... more Marina Garcés is a Barcelona-based philosopher and essayist, a professor of philosophy, and a founding member of the collective project of critical and experimental thinking Espai en Blanc (Blank Space). She is currently the director of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Master’s Degree in Philosophy for Contemporary Challenges. She has published several essays on contemporary politics and critical thought, including Filosofía inacabada (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015), Fora de classe. Textos de filosofía de guerrilla (Arcadia, 2016), Nova il·lustració radical (Anagrama, 2018) and Ciutat Princesa (2018) and Escuela de aprendices (2020).
6 views
The director, actor, performer, and artist Kidlat Tahimik, which means “Silent Lightning” in Ta... more The director, actor, performer, and artist Kidlat Tahimik, which means “Silent Lightning” in Tagalog, is a key figure of the so-called ‘slow cinema’ movement, as well as an undisputed pioneer of Filipino independent film. Tahimik’s self-reflexive, and often satirical filmography and intermedia artistic practice takes the form of an improvisational back and forth, whereby artworks reference the storytelling in his films and the latter become open narratives under constant revision. Tahimik’s installations and films present us with a critical entanglement between the personal, Filipino traditions and knowledges, and the country’s violent colonial legacies. Something Tahimik himself has described as cinema’s ‘third way,’ a critical standpoint against capitalism’s investment in the individual in favor a collective and shared struggle of the colonized.
7 views
Set the Farm on Fire Filmmaker Oliver Laxe and screenwriter Santiago Fillol and Sara Nadal-Me... more Set the Farm on Fire
Filmmaker Oliver Laxe and screenwriter Santiago Fillol and Sara Nadal-Melsió
Oliver Laxe is a French-born Galician film director, screenwriter, and actor. Laxe grew up between France, Spain and Morocco. His first two films screened at the Cannes Film Festival: You All Are Captains (FIPRESCI Prize, 2010 Directors’ Fortnight) and Mimosas (Grand Prize, 2016 Critics’ week). His third feature Fire Will Come, was shot in Galicia, the land of his ancestors, and won the Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Laxe also played the leading role in Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015).
Santiago Fillol is a Barcelona-based Argentinian filmmaker and screenwriter currently teaching in the cinema department at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Historias de la desaparición. El cine desde los fuer
5 views
Over the past 25 years Paul Ramirez-Jonas has sought to challenge the definitions of art and the ... more Over the past 25 years Paul Ramirez-Jonas has sought to challenge the definitions of art and the public and to engineer active audience participation and exchange. He has been made public in galleries, institutions and urban spaces around the world. He has been an Associate Professor at Hunter College since 2007; and is represented by Galeria Nara Roesler in Sao Paulo and New York.
[Selected solo exhibitions include Museo Jumex, Mexico City, The New Museum, NYC, Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulo; The Aldrich Contemporary Museum, Connecticut; The Blanton Museum, Texas; a survey at Ikon Gallery (UK) and Cornerhouse (UK) in 2004, and a 25 year survey at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in 2017. Selected group exhibitions at P.S.1; the Brooklyn Museum; The Whitechapel (UK); Irish Museum of Modern Art (Ireland); and Kunsthaus Zurich. He participated in the 1st Johannesburg Biennale; 1st Seoul Biennial; 6th Shanghai Biennial; 28th Sao Paulo Biennial; 53rd Venice Biennial]
4 views
Books by Sara Nadal-Melsió
ACLA 2024 René Wellek Prize, Monograph: Honorable Mention
POLITICALLY RED, 2023
“Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary d... more “Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events
Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure
ZONE BOOKS, 2025
In this stunningly original book, Sara Nadal-Melsió explores how the work of several contemporary... more In this stunningly original book, Sara Nadal-Melsió explores how the work of several contemporary artists illuminates the current crisis of European universalist values amid the brutal realities of exclusion and policing of borders. The “wolf” is the name Baroque musicians gave to the dissonant sound produced in any attempt to temper and harmonize an instrument. Europe and the Wolf brings this musical figure to bear on contemporary aesthetic practices that respond to Europe’s ongoing social and political contradictions. Throughout, Nadal-Melsió understands Europe as a conceptual problem that often relies on harmonization as an organizing category. The “wolf” as an emblem of disharmony, incarnated in the stranger, the immigrant, or the refugee, originates in the Latin proverb “man is a wolf to man.” This longstanding phrase evokes the pervasive fear, and even hatred, of what is foreign, unknown, or beyond the borders of a community. The book follows the “wolf” in a series of relays between the musical, the visual, and the political, and through innovative readings of artworks—by, among others, Carles Santos, Pere Portabella, Allora&Calzadilla, and Anri Sala. Traversed by the musical, these artworks, as well as Nadal-Melsió’s writing, present unstable symbolic and material ensembles in an array of variations of political possibilities and impossibilities that evade institutions intolerant of uncertainty and wary of diversity.
“A breathtaking analysis of Europe’s fables of freedom and progress… valiantly upholds art as the light that can lead us to the end of the tunnel.” —Jorge Coronado
“A poignant and courageous embrace of dissonance, Europe and the Wolf invites us to listen to the ontological fugitives and refugees of political or cultural hegemony. Through an intricate web of interludes, variations, and codas, Sara Nadal-Melsió assembles a rich sound assemblage of contemporary performance artists, filmmakers, musicians, and writers who excavate colonial violence as the ruinous hidden foundation of a unified Europe. The result is a surprisingly poetic and hospitable archive of dissonance, one that resists figurative traces and representation and instead captures the flash appearance of what is deemed uncertain and unsafe.”
— Nicola Behrmann, Rutgers University
“You need to follow in the paces of this wondrous book, a wolf’s harried tracks, to feel what’s driving it. Nadal-Melsió theorizes the oddest effect: music that pleases through disharmony. Faculties in harmonious free play produce aesthetic pleasure, according to Kant. For Nadal-Melsió, music that throws the faculties out of tune produce another kind of pleasure and another mode of freedom. Pleasure at discovering the displaced beings, the wolves, whose free night prowls disturb Europe’s sleep.”
— Paul North, Yale University
“Nadal-Melsió writes about art that makes philosophical interventions, and therefore acts politically. Rather than a series of critical and philosophical pronouncements ‘on’ the art, these interlinked essays are a form of orchestration, inducing us to hear the wolf tone in Bach and to explore intervals rather than live in a world of territories and borders. Page after page, we learn to find the secret dissonance inside of order and to internalize dissidence as a form of listening otherwise.”
— Alexander Nagel, New York University
“Nadal-Melsió executes a breathtaking analysis of Europe’s fables of freedom and progress and in so doing models the most significant intervention thinking can make today: interrogating the ideal of humanity that the Enlightenment has tantalizingly offered us yet which never arrives. The book that the reader holds in their hands constitutes a meticulous undoing of the very notion of Europe even as it valiantly upholds art as the light that can lead us to the end of the tunnel.”
— Jorge Coronado, Northwestern University
VIDEOS by Sara Nadal-Melsió
Papers by Sara Nadal-Melsió
This essay series, generously supported by Scott Lynn, is named in honor of the art historian and... more This essay series, generously supported by Scott Lynn, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an "oblique contemporary" to come into view.
“En #Sol, revolución: paisajes lingüísticos para tomar las plazas” by Luisa Martín Rojo and Carmelo Díaz de Frutos
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Apr 3, 2014
The text before us can be read in a myriad of ways: a historical document, a catalog of formal st... more The text before us can be read in a myriad of ways: a historical document, a catalog of formal strategies, a participatory diagnostic of an event that is far from finished, an academic exercise, a political intervention, and a manual for the occupation of the agora. The list could go on and on. However, what condenses the specificity of the piece is precisely that it is all those things at once. Thus, I would like to respond and react to “#En Sol, revolución: paisajes lingüísticos para tomar las plazas” as a symptom in itself. A symptom of what exactly? At the very least, two things are crucial to the creative political capital of the movement: the undoing of specialization and the social boundaries it carries, on the one hand, and the comedic potential of political heteropias, on the other. Both of these strategies, the authors remind us, take place in the agora. Yet, while the partitions of space and time in our received idea of Platonic city and its agora spoke to the production of consensus through internalized ideology, what is at stake here is what I would call an Aristophanic re-appropriation of the agora as a commons; whereby equality becomes a practice that uses the rhetoric of shared laughter. That this is a collective piece is also essential because it speaks to the suspension of the laws of competition that rule the capitalist market. Collaboration as a form of autogestión not only suspends competition but also short-circuits individual ideological interpellations in favor of a collective heteronomy that demands the emergence of the political commons. If we are to inherit the legacies of the indignados as an exercise in the political imagination or, more precisely, as an experiment in political form, then it is clear that the tragic paradigm of emancipation – the either/or between the free and the unfree – does not function here, for we are not faced with the agonic narrative of war – which, as we know, is so powerful that it succeeded in overtaking the great majority of “successful” revolutions. We are not witnessing here a dream or a promise of emancipation but rather the daily practice of emancipation. Such a practice contains a comedy and signals a social void it refuses to fill. Tragedy can contain a promise of redemption, comedy refuses to do so. If the biggest danger facing the indignados movement is its banalization at the hands of its chroniclers, understanding the place of comedy in the agora becomes key. The French May 1968 already provided an alarming warning as to the dangers of becoming an inoffensive commonplace. To put it very simply: that they are having fun does not mean they are not serious! Take the example of the authors of this photographic and linguistic academic reportage: their participation in the events can only take place because they are not Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2014 Vol. 15, Nos. 1–2, 187–188, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2014.938455
Un bildungs-roman perfers: gènere i identitat en el segle XX
L' Avenç: Revista de història i cultura, 2000
... Un bildungs-roman perfers: gènere i identitat en el segle XX. Autores: Sara Nadal-Melsió; Loc... more ... Un bildungs-roman perfers: gènere i identitat en el segle XX. Autores: Sara Nadal-Melsió; Localización: L' Avenç: Revista de història i cultura, ISSN 0210-0150, Nº 248, 2000 , págs. 60-64. Fundación Dialnet. Acceso de usuarios registrados. ...
La passió segons Renée Vivien. De Maria-Mercè Marçal. Barcelona: Columna, 1994. (353 pag.)
Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat, 1995
Politically Red
Cultural Critique, 2023
The dead ends of photogénie. From cinephilia to cinephobia and back: Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis XIV and Roi Soleil
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Apr 3, 2021
ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s threefold treatment of the figure... more ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s threefold treatment of the figure of Louis XIV through a film, a performance and a video installation, in order to examine the role of negativity and deferral in his relationship to cinema as a medium. By analyzing Serra’s classical understanding of photogénie as an expression of destructive plasticity, I delve into the structural cinephobia that undergirds his films. I suggest that the mystery at the core of La mort de Louis XIV is not death but the cinematic image itself, not the body as matter but rather the body as a virtual image capable of traversing and surviving different temporal organizations. Through this reading, Serra’s cinema emerges as a false promise to see through and beyond the two-dimensional image that transforms desire into an optical illusion.
Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Michael Sheringham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 437
Modern Philology, Nov 1, 2009
Buñuel's Eschatological Avant-Garde: Las Hurdes and Indexical Realism
Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2013
Through an examination of Luís Buñuel's 1933 documentary Las Hurdes, this essay engages and e... more Through an examination of Luís Buñuel's 1933 documentary Las Hurdes, this essay engages and expands on the notion of indexical realism. The film signals Buñuel's distancing from orthodox surrealism in favor of a politically complex examination of the region of Las Hurdes as a national and ethnographical commonplace. The argument hinges on Buñuel's use of the absolute and impossible perspective of the hurdanos. Through his use of an eschatological avant-gardism, he catches a glimpse of the Real, as a radical expression of exteriority. Las Hurdes emerges as a paradigmatic example of a revolutionary form of ontological cinema that contains a theory of non-mimetic referentiality. Indexical realism refers here to an understanding of realism that is not concerned with representation or mimesis but with the ability to point deictically, as an index, to a reality that is necessarily outside the realm of representation. Thus the target of Buñuel's indexical realism is not representation but presence. Representation is only its byproduct, which often takes the form of an interruption of presence. Indexical realism hints at the exteriority of presence through discontinuities and ruptures of semblance. Politically, Las Hurdes emerges from this discussion as an expression of fidelity to the radical otherness of the hurdano event, the exteriority of their death, which in turn becomes the index that validates the film as a political gesture. Buñuel's indexical realism thus stands as an ethical and aesthetic counterpart to the restrained political action that would occupy Spanish intellectuals during the 1930s.
Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat, 1995
On the occasion of the exhibition "Debris Field/Notes for a Poem on the Third World/Soleil Nègre ... more On the occasion of the exhibition "Debris Field/Notes for a Poem on the Third World/Soleil Nègre (September 8 - October 4, 2018) at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
11 views
Marina Garcés is a Barcelona-based philosopher and essayist, a professor of philosophy, and a fou... more Marina Garcés is a Barcelona-based philosopher and essayist, a professor of philosophy, and a founding member of the collective project of critical and experimental thinking Espai en Blanc (Blank Space). She is currently the director of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Master’s Degree in Philosophy for Contemporary Challenges. She has published several essays on contemporary politics and critical thought, including Filosofía inacabada (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015), Fora de classe. Textos de filosofía de guerrilla (Arcadia, 2016), Nova il·lustració radical (Anagrama, 2018) and Ciutat Princesa (2018) and Escuela de aprendices (2020).
6 views
The director, actor, performer, and artist Kidlat Tahimik, which means “Silent Lightning” in Ta... more The director, actor, performer, and artist Kidlat Tahimik, which means “Silent Lightning” in Tagalog, is a key figure of the so-called ‘slow cinema’ movement, as well as an undisputed pioneer of Filipino independent film. Tahimik’s self-reflexive, and often satirical filmography and intermedia artistic practice takes the form of an improvisational back and forth, whereby artworks reference the storytelling in his films and the latter become open narratives under constant revision. Tahimik’s installations and films present us with a critical entanglement between the personal, Filipino traditions and knowledges, and the country’s violent colonial legacies. Something Tahimik himself has described as cinema’s ‘third way,’ a critical standpoint against capitalism’s investment in the individual in favor a collective and shared struggle of the colonized.
7 views
Set the Farm on Fire Filmmaker Oliver Laxe and screenwriter Santiago Fillol and Sara Nadal-Me... more Set the Farm on Fire
Filmmaker Oliver Laxe and screenwriter Santiago Fillol and Sara Nadal-Melsió
Oliver Laxe is a French-born Galician film director, screenwriter, and actor. Laxe grew up between France, Spain and Morocco. His first two films screened at the Cannes Film Festival: You All Are Captains (FIPRESCI Prize, 2010 Directors’ Fortnight) and Mimosas (Grand Prize, 2016 Critics’ week). His third feature Fire Will Come, was shot in Galicia, the land of his ancestors, and won the Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Laxe also played the leading role in Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015).
Santiago Fillol is a Barcelona-based Argentinian filmmaker and screenwriter currently teaching in the cinema department at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Historias de la desaparición. El cine desde los fuer
5 views
Over the past 25 years Paul Ramirez-Jonas has sought to challenge the definitions of art and the ... more Over the past 25 years Paul Ramirez-Jonas has sought to challenge the definitions of art and the public and to engineer active audience participation and exchange. He has been made public in galleries, institutions and urban spaces around the world. He has been an Associate Professor at Hunter College since 2007; and is represented by Galeria Nara Roesler in Sao Paulo and New York.
[Selected solo exhibitions include Museo Jumex, Mexico City, The New Museum, NYC, Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulo; The Aldrich Contemporary Museum, Connecticut; The Blanton Museum, Texas; a survey at Ikon Gallery (UK) and Cornerhouse (UK) in 2004, and a 25 year survey at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in 2017. Selected group exhibitions at P.S.1; the Brooklyn Museum; The Whitechapel (UK); Irish Museum of Modern Art (Ireland); and Kunsthaus Zurich. He participated in the 1st Johannesburg Biennale; 1st Seoul Biennial; 6th Shanghai Biennial; 28th Sao Paulo Biennial; 53rd Venice Biennial]
4 views
ACLA 2024 René Wellek Prize, Monograph: Honorable Mention
POLITICALLY RED, 2023
“Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary d... more “Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events
Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure
ZONE BOOKS, 2025
In this stunningly original book, Sara Nadal-Melsió explores how the work of several contemporary... more In this stunningly original book, Sara Nadal-Melsió explores how the work of several contemporary artists illuminates the current crisis of European universalist values amid the brutal realities of exclusion and policing of borders. The “wolf” is the name Baroque musicians gave to the dissonant sound produced in any attempt to temper and harmonize an instrument. Europe and the Wolf brings this musical figure to bear on contemporary aesthetic practices that respond to Europe’s ongoing social and political contradictions. Throughout, Nadal-Melsió understands Europe as a conceptual problem that often relies on harmonization as an organizing category. The “wolf” as an emblem of disharmony, incarnated in the stranger, the immigrant, or the refugee, originates in the Latin proverb “man is a wolf to man.” This longstanding phrase evokes the pervasive fear, and even hatred, of what is foreign, unknown, or beyond the borders of a community. The book follows the “wolf” in a series of relays between the musical, the visual, and the political, and through innovative readings of artworks—by, among others, Carles Santos, Pere Portabella, Allora&Calzadilla, and Anri Sala. Traversed by the musical, these artworks, as well as Nadal-Melsió’s writing, present unstable symbolic and material ensembles in an array of variations of political possibilities and impossibilities that evade institutions intolerant of uncertainty and wary of diversity.
“A breathtaking analysis of Europe’s fables of freedom and progress… valiantly upholds art as the light that can lead us to the end of the tunnel.” —Jorge Coronado
“A poignant and courageous embrace of dissonance, Europe and the Wolf invites us to listen to the ontological fugitives and refugees of political or cultural hegemony. Through an intricate web of interludes, variations, and codas, Sara Nadal-Melsió assembles a rich sound assemblage of contemporary performance artists, filmmakers, musicians, and writers who excavate colonial violence as the ruinous hidden foundation of a unified Europe. The result is a surprisingly poetic and hospitable archive of dissonance, one that resists figurative traces and representation and instead captures the flash appearance of what is deemed uncertain and unsafe.”
— Nicola Behrmann, Rutgers University
“You need to follow in the paces of this wondrous book, a wolf’s harried tracks, to feel what’s driving it. Nadal-Melsió theorizes the oddest effect: music that pleases through disharmony. Faculties in harmonious free play produce aesthetic pleasure, according to Kant. For Nadal-Melsió, music that throws the faculties out of tune produce another kind of pleasure and another mode of freedom. Pleasure at discovering the displaced beings, the wolves, whose free night prowls disturb Europe’s sleep.”
— Paul North, Yale University
“Nadal-Melsió writes about art that makes philosophical interventions, and therefore acts politically. Rather than a series of critical and philosophical pronouncements ‘on’ the art, these interlinked essays are a form of orchestration, inducing us to hear the wolf tone in Bach and to explore intervals rather than live in a world of territories and borders. Page after page, we learn to find the secret dissonance inside of order and to internalize dissidence as a form of listening otherwise.”
— Alexander Nagel, New York University
“Nadal-Melsió executes a breathtaking analysis of Europe’s fables of freedom and progress and in so doing models the most significant intervention thinking can make today: interrogating the ideal of humanity that the Enlightenment has tantalizingly offered us yet which never arrives. The book that the reader holds in their hands constitutes a meticulous undoing of the very notion of Europe even as it valiantly upholds art as the light that can lead us to the end of the tunnel.”
— Jorge Coronado, Northwestern University
This essay series, generously supported by Scott Lynn, is named in honor of the art historian and... more This essay series, generously supported by Scott Lynn, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an "oblique contemporary" to come into view.
“En #Sol, revolución: paisajes lingüísticos para tomar las plazas” by Luisa Martín Rojo and Carmelo Díaz de Frutos
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Apr 3, 2014
The text before us can be read in a myriad of ways: a historical document, a catalog of formal st... more The text before us can be read in a myriad of ways: a historical document, a catalog of formal strategies, a participatory diagnostic of an event that is far from finished, an academic exercise, a political intervention, and a manual for the occupation of the agora. The list could go on and on. However, what condenses the specificity of the piece is precisely that it is all those things at once. Thus, I would like to respond and react to “#En Sol, revolución: paisajes lingüísticos para tomar las plazas” as a symptom in itself. A symptom of what exactly? At the very least, two things are crucial to the creative political capital of the movement: the undoing of specialization and the social boundaries it carries, on the one hand, and the comedic potential of political heteropias, on the other. Both of these strategies, the authors remind us, take place in the agora. Yet, while the partitions of space and time in our received idea of Platonic city and its agora spoke to the production of consensus through internalized ideology, what is at stake here is what I would call an Aristophanic re-appropriation of the agora as a commons; whereby equality becomes a practice that uses the rhetoric of shared laughter. That this is a collective piece is also essential because it speaks to the suspension of the laws of competition that rule the capitalist market. Collaboration as a form of autogestión not only suspends competition but also short-circuits individual ideological interpellations in favor of a collective heteronomy that demands the emergence of the political commons. If we are to inherit the legacies of the indignados as an exercise in the political imagination or, more precisely, as an experiment in political form, then it is clear that the tragic paradigm of emancipation – the either/or between the free and the unfree – does not function here, for we are not faced with the agonic narrative of war – which, as we know, is so powerful that it succeeded in overtaking the great majority of “successful” revolutions. We are not witnessing here a dream or a promise of emancipation but rather the daily practice of emancipation. Such a practice contains a comedy and signals a social void it refuses to fill. Tragedy can contain a promise of redemption, comedy refuses to do so. If the biggest danger facing the indignados movement is its banalization at the hands of its chroniclers, understanding the place of comedy in the agora becomes key. The French May 1968 already provided an alarming warning as to the dangers of becoming an inoffensive commonplace. To put it very simply: that they are having fun does not mean they are not serious! Take the example of the authors of this photographic and linguistic academic reportage: their participation in the events can only take place because they are not Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2014 Vol. 15, Nos. 1–2, 187–188, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2014.938455
Un bildungs-roman perfers: gènere i identitat en el segle XX
L' Avenç: Revista de història i cultura, 2000
... Un bildungs-roman perfers: gènere i identitat en el segle XX. Autores: Sara Nadal-Melsió; Loc... more ... Un bildungs-roman perfers: gènere i identitat en el segle XX. Autores: Sara Nadal-Melsió; Localización: L' Avenç: Revista de història i cultura, ISSN 0210-0150, Nº 248, 2000 , págs. 60-64. Fundación Dialnet. Acceso de usuarios registrados. ...
La passió segons Renée Vivien. De Maria-Mercè Marçal. Barcelona: Columna, 1994. (353 pag.)
Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat, 1995
Politically Red
Cultural Critique, 2023
The dead ends of photogénie. From cinephilia to cinephobia and back: Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis XIV and Roi Soleil
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Apr 3, 2021
ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s threefold treatment of the figure... more ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s threefold treatment of the figure of Louis XIV through a film, a performance and a video installation, in order to examine the role of negativity and deferral in his relationship to cinema as a medium. By analyzing Serra’s classical understanding of photogénie as an expression of destructive plasticity, I delve into the structural cinephobia that undergirds his films. I suggest that the mystery at the core of La mort de Louis XIV is not death but the cinematic image itself, not the body as matter but rather the body as a virtual image capable of traversing and surviving different temporal organizations. Through this reading, Serra’s cinema emerges as a false promise to see through and beyond the two-dimensional image that transforms desire into an optical illusion.
Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Michael Sheringham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 437
Modern Philology, Nov 1, 2009
Buñuel's Eschatological Avant-Garde: Las Hurdes and Indexical Realism
Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2013
Through an examination of Luís Buñuel's 1933 documentary Las Hurdes, this essay engages and e... more Through an examination of Luís Buñuel's 1933 documentary Las Hurdes, this essay engages and expands on the notion of indexical realism. The film signals Buñuel's distancing from orthodox surrealism in favor of a politically complex examination of the region of Las Hurdes as a national and ethnographical commonplace. The argument hinges on Buñuel's use of the absolute and impossible perspective of the hurdanos. Through his use of an eschatological avant-gardism, he catches a glimpse of the Real, as a radical expression of exteriority. Las Hurdes emerges as a paradigmatic example of a revolutionary form of ontological cinema that contains a theory of non-mimetic referentiality. Indexical realism refers here to an understanding of realism that is not concerned with representation or mimesis but with the ability to point deictically, as an index, to a reality that is necessarily outside the realm of representation. Thus the target of Buñuel's indexical realism is not representation but presence. Representation is only its byproduct, which often takes the form of an interruption of presence. Indexical realism hints at the exteriority of presence through discontinuities and ruptures of semblance. Politically, Las Hurdes emerges from this discussion as an expression of fidelity to the radical otherness of the hurdano event, the exteriority of their death, which in turn becomes the index that validates the film as a political gesture. Buñuel's indexical realism thus stands as an ethical and aesthetic counterpart to the restrained political action that would occupy Spanish intellectuals during the 1930s.
Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat, 1995
Politically Red
Cultural Critique
Ressenyes
Obra ressenyada: Maria-Mercè Marçal, La passió segons Renée Vivien. Barcelona: Columna, 1994
Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2019
The dead ends of photogénie. From cinephilia to cinephobia and back: Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis XIV and Roi Soleil
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2021
This paper focuses on Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s threefold treatment of the figure of Louis... more This paper focuses on Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s threefold treatment of the figure of Louis XIV through a film, a performance and a video installation, in order to examine the role of negativity and deferral in his relationship to cinema as a medium. By analyzing Serra’s classical understanding of photogénie as an expression of destructive plasticity, I delve into the structural cinephobia that undergirds his films. I suggest that the mystery at the core of La mort de Louis XIV is not death but the cinematic image itself, not the body as matter but rather the body as a virtual image capable of traversing and surviving different temporal organizations. Through this reading, Serra’s cinema emerges as a false promise to see through and beyond the two-dimensional image that transforms desire into an optical illusion.
Lectora Revista De Dones I Textualitat, Jun 16, 2010
Buñuel's Eschatological Avant-Garde: Las Hurdes and Indexical Realism
Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2013
Through an examination of Luís Buñuel's 1933 documentary Las Hurdes, this essay engages and e... more Through an examination of Luís Buñuel's 1933 documentary Las Hurdes, this essay engages and expands on the notion of indexical realism. The film signals Buñuel's distancing from orthodox surrealism in favor of a politically complex examination of the region of Las Hurdes as a national and ethnographical commonplace. The argument hinges on Buñuel's use of the absolute and impossible perspective of the hurdanos. Through his use of an eschatological avant-gardism, he catches a glimpse of the Real, as a radical expression of exteriority. Las Hurdes emerges as a paradigmatic example of a revolutionary form of ontological cinema that contains a theory of non-mimetic referentiality. Indexical realism refers here to an understanding of realism that is not concerned with representation or mimesis but with the ability to point deictically, as an index, to a reality that is necessarily outside the realm of representation. Thus the target of Buñuel's indexical realism is not representation but presence. Representation is only its byproduct, which often takes the form of an interruption of presence. Indexical realism hints at the exteriority of presence through discontinuities and ruptures of semblance. Politically, Las Hurdes emerges from this discussion as an expression of fidelity to the radical otherness of the hurdano event, the exteriority of their death, which in turn becomes the index that validates the film as a political gesture. Buñuel's indexical realism thus stands as an ethical and aesthetic counterpart to the restrained political action that would occupy Spanish intellectuals during the 1930s.
Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (review)
Comparative Literature Studies, 2008
Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat, 2005
El Agotamiento del paradigma trágico: Filoctetes y los usos políticos de la comedia