Not a fantasy city: Composition, fotogènia and the reconquesta del real in the theatrical and cinematic land/lang-scapes of Barcelona

Focusing on the return of the real in contemporary art, the article examines how Lluïsa Cunillé’s play, Barcelona, mapa d’ombres (2004), and Ventura Pons’s 2007 film, Barcelona (un mapa), apprehend the urban landscape as ‘composition’, and how they bring into dialectical relation modes of apprehension and representation traditionally perceived and pitched as ideologically opposed or mutually exclusive. Like modernist art (cubism), these works beget oppositional and counter-hegemonic ways of imagining the urban landscape within what remains ‘the ongoing dominance of the “hegemony” of capital’. As a mode of analysis, composition does not only interrupt the ‘delirious equivalency’ of late capitalist abstraction, but it also becomes a deliberate intervention in self-fashioning and city-making endowed with a political, if not also an ethical, component.