Cartographies of la_langue in El Carmel
2022–2023
Cartographies of la_langue is a project of community exploration and re-appropriation of territory through artistic creation, lived experience, and relationships. A process that began in September 2022 and continued with a second working phase until December 2023, culminating in an exhibition web platform that bears witness to what took place there.
Driving team: Celeste Reyna, Marco Noris, Nora Ancarola. With the support of Fundació Els Tres Turons and Carmel a la Vista. In collaboration with Carmel Amunt.
Poetic and singular re-appropriations of the territory of the Carmel neighbourhood
«When we stroll through the world, what counts is not the head but the feet. Knowing where you tread. The feet are the great readers of the book of the world, of geography. One does not walk with the head.»
— Francesc Tosquelles1
Point of departure
The project starts from the importance of the mother tongue for psychoanalysis, and from how the work of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Francesc Tosquelles —remembered in the CCCB exhibition— gave value to language and to collective ways of communicating, at once as a therapeutic tool and as a means of social transformation.
Its horizon is to create community spaces and resources in which to work through unease by way of creative processes. We are a collective, a team of people from the fields of art and psychoanalysis, working on la_langue, the wounds produced by all migrations, individual and group memory, the interrelation with territory, and the collective handling of unease.
The process
The first stage served to get to know the Carmel territory and its needs, and to form a group with which to work through the effects of migrations and wounds, rethinking instituted places and beginning to rewrite them on a map and its layers.
Little by little we mapped the marks produced by migrations —“the wounds” that open and surface within language— through a poetic re-appropriation of the neighbourhood territory. We shaped a visual, textual, and sound social cartography: a living cartography, re-signifying the territory, that grew with each gathering.
Questions for a cartography of la_langue
The textual route began from a handful of open questions that guided the inquiry:
- Everything that speaks around us — in what language or languages does it do so?
- What might it mean for us to walk the other’s path?
- Can walking become a space of singular inquiry?
- How does the place change in relation to us, and we in relation to the place?
- When does a place become foreign?
- When can a space be hospitable?
- Can a popular song become a refuge?
- How can we record memory so that it does not turn into oblivion?
Routes
The group cartography unfolded across several routes:
- Sound route (the singular presentations: subjective passages of voice and text, the first traces of the map)
- Walking routes
- Photographic route
- Textual route
- Memory route
- Video route – WeLab
Driving team
- Celeste Reyna
- Marco Noris
- Nora Ancarola
Context and alliances
Started in September 2022 at Carmel a la Vista, the project drew on the support of Fundació Els Tres Turons —through service users and professionals— and the participation of neighbourhood entities and spaces such as Carmel Amunt and the Casal de Barri La Barraca del Carmel. The second working phase ran until December 2023.
With the support of:
In collaboration with:
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From the recordings of the conversations with Tosquelles made by François Pain, Danielle Sivadon and Jean-Claude Polack (1987), the basis of the film Une politique de la folie (1989). Cited from the exhibition catalogue Tosquelles. Com una màquina de cosir en un camp de blat (Barcelona: CCCB, 2022). ⤶