Somatic Landscapes and Urban Identities: Mapping Emotional Engagements through Site, Dance and Body Connections in Raval, Barcelona, a Case Study

• Main Authors: Ana Maria Moya Pellitero, Victoria Hunter
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Athens Institute for Education and Research 2020-07-01
• Series: Athens Journal of Architecture
• Online Access: https://www.athensjournals.gr/architecture/2020-6-3-3-Pellitero.pdf

The historic neighbourhood of Raval, in Barcelona presents a multicultural urban landscape. It contains a sense of both tangible and intangible identities influenced by a high level of social mobility arising from migration, tourism and urban gentrification processes. In April 2018 we led an exploratory workshop with neighbourhood residents, our objective was to observe the multisensorial nature of this urban landscape with locally-based participants. Through an arts-based residency we explored body-site relations by drawing attention to the body, human movement in space and its relation to and reflection of the urban landscape. Our methodology involved a five-day movement workshop with 14 participants in site-based movement experimentation through which we explored urban affects, engagement, familiarity, and senses of belonging to space. We focused our attention on the creation of emotional and sensorial landscapes through our bodies, using site-specific movement explorations in space and experimental modes of cartography in which we ‘mapped’ the neighbourhood according to our experiences, senses and emotions. We considered the communicative role of the body as a producer of non-verbal and non-representative language that expressed experiences of the sites in which we moved. The mapping of urban space through the body enabled us to understand the participants’ subjective engagement with space (feelings, emotions, rhythms, movements, intensities, memories, wishes, visions). We explored landscape as an active and predicative creation arising from subjective and vital experience, conscious, cognitive and sensorially filtered and shaped by memories, emotions, narratives and perceptions. Through sharing experiences and “co-mapping” bodies and urban sites we explored the intra-active nature of these engagements through New Materialist lenses, spatial theory and discourses of urban flow and mobility.