1. Introduction
On the occasion of the Murillo Year event, from 2017 to 2018, the fourth centenary of the painter’s birth was celebrated in Seville. Among the exhibitions related to this event, which ended up extending until 2019, the only one entirely dedicated to give a response from a genre review on the painter’s work was
Maculadas sin Remedio (Maculates without Remedy) (Rodríguez-Cunill et al. 2019). During the Murillo Year, the painter was used as the city’s brand image, and still is. This followed in the wake of other events -in Seville and in Spain-, that were highly propagandistic and had sometimes transformed the city in many ways, such as the universal expositions of 1929 or 1992 (
Seville Expo’92). In both cases, the city turned out to be a product (Díaz 2016). In the Murillo Year event, the city was occupied by scaffolding decorated with images created by the painter, including the famous and widespread Immaculate Conception Virgins (
Figure 1).
In the group exhibition Maculadas sin Remedio there was a two-piece pictorial work representing a map. Its title: La Manada City (The Pack City), and its subtitle: Commemorative map of the last four centuries of Patriarchy. In the exhibition catalogue, however, only one of the pieces appeared, the one containing the title of the work, and it was announced as a work in progress (Rodríguez-Cunill et al. 2019). Nevertheless, the wide media dissemination showed that there were two pieces actually exhibited. These pieces were accompanied by a bilingual street guide in English and Spanish. But in the work of art, the names of streets, points of interest, monuments etc. were written in English. It looked like a vision of Google Earth, or Google Maps in satellite view, with a certain three-dimensionality, as it was a collage with different techniques and, in a number of tabs we were given more information (thumbnails and number of reviews).
The diffusion of
La Manada City increased with the itinerancy of the exhibition, and even more so when
Maculadas sin remedio was branded as blasphemous in its exhibition at the Palace of the Merced (location of Provincial Council of Cordoba). At that moment, a controversial process against the artists began, and it would last in court until April 2021, but failed to prove that any of the artists had offended religious feelings (
Figure 2).
On the other hand, the work La Manada City was signed under the name of a registered trademark, Inma la Inmunda. This signature was already in other previous works by the autor that were related to situations of violence (Peña Saint Martín and López Marroquín 2022, Rodríguez Cunill, 2021a, Rodríguez Muñoz, 2019). This research is important because it highlight group violence not through a protest, but through very literary artistic processes, given the peculiar features of this complex pictorial work, still in development. We are convinced that the study of this work will help us to make systemic violence visible, an aim that was already present in the work La Manada City.
While the subtitle of La Manada City referred to the four centuries of the event of the birth of Murillo, the painter-brand of the city of Seville (as Picasso is of Malaga), the title referred to a well-known case of group violence against women, committed by a group of Sevillian men, against a young woman during the San Fermines Festival in Pamplona. La Manada, as these men called themselves in a wasap group, were sexual predators. Over time, it was proven that the crimes committed in Pamplona had also occurred in other parts of Spain. A high number of women’s reactions to this case, from feminist activism and artivism, were grouped in the book Mujeres y resistencias en tiempos de manadas (Gómez Nicolau et al. 2021), but the case of the painting La Manada City was not included. La Manada City is not only based on the case of these sexual predators, but has an ambition of analysis of group violence in or from the city of Seville, as we will see. In short, a wide range of group violence, patriarchy, gender issues and art bring together in the title of this map of violence.
These two first wood panels of
La Manada City arre the only ones exhibited so far. However, the work in progress continued during the period of confinement. In 2021 a book was registered in ISBN under the title
La Manada City, by Inma la Inmunda. Apart from other previous works, it contained a painting-collage of eight pieces of a large map of violence. The first two pieces coincided with those ones exhibited in
Maculadas sin Remedio. In addition, their arrangement allowed a horizontal reading
Figure 3), from left to right (1,5 x 8 meters), or a visualization similar to many maps, in a format of 3x4 meters (
Figure 4).
This work is important because it is a novelty in the study of the visibility of concealed violence, whether systemic, global, individual or group violence, and presents different levels of reading that illustrate the problem of violence through a city. Given the verbal dimension of this pictorial work in the form of a map, it seems pivotal to carry out a linguistic and literary analysis of the clues about the city of violence that we see represented in La Manada City. However, due to the features of the map, which could be extended indefinitely, it is possible to find more linguistic data in future pieces.
1.1. Background
Several aspects are noteworthy in the current state of the research field where our study could be located. In our view, the uniqueness of this pictorial work leads to a number of questions whose background we can elucidate:
-The complex conception of the city through the experience of peoples, communities or minorities, specifically through their emotions and the constructions of imaginary about the space they inhabit.
-The research on making visible group violence in a contemporary environment.
-The idea of archiving and specifically the idea of archives of situations of violence and their relations to the map.
The city is a cubicle of human interactions. As such, it is also a cubicle of violence, and is constructed by it. Mehta (2017) reminded us of the invisible role of affectivity in cities, in his case, starting from the communities that came from Mumbai, authors of the constructed idea of a city that did not belong to the mainstream, but which spread the image of New York in other spaces of the planet. Literature has numerous antecedents of descriptions of cities from an emotional point of view and from the injustices that occur in the world and therefore in cities. In the 15th century, Christine de Pizán (Pizán [1405] and Lemarchand 2022) created a city of ladies in response to the misogyny of men in society, specially clergymen. In his written walking by the Hypocrisy, Quevedo (1627) made a description of the moral evils of the cities of his time. Reflection on cities from the emotional point of view has been a constant in Western World, and has highlighted what the single oppressive thought and propaganda hide.
Is La Manada City the outcome of an archival labour? Numerous twentieth-century artworks have turned to the archive as a process, and there is abundant literature on the subject. Repetition has been a preferred process in artists such as Hanne Darboven, On Kawara, Stanley Brown and many others (Gaeun Ji 2017).
Regarding to the artists who have developed their work under the paradigm of the archive, we find very different sensibilities: Christian Boltanski, Allan McCollum, Annette Messager, Hanne Darboven, Bern y Hilla Becher, Ydessa Hendeles, or Gerhard Richter (Buchloh talked about his Atlas as an anomic archive, where categories were not clearly specified) among others.
To give an example, from a feminist perspective that can be related to La Manada City, Nancy Spero made Torture of Women (1976), a series of 14 panels from a roll of 3810 cm. that collected texts on the Amnesty International reports that showed the brutality of the testimonies of aggressions against women. In this case, archiving, violence and gender issues coincide with the artwork we are going to analyse linguistically. But reflections on archival work in art have focused on specific artists or movements (Buchloch, 1999, Foster 2004, Alphen 2008, Zapperi 2013, England 2017, Glisic and Puric 2019, Saviotti and Medina Estupiñán 2022 etc.), except for some more general or mixed documents (Olalquiaga 2008, Smith 2008, Derrida and Prenowitz 1995 and the irreverent and critic investigation of Steedman 2002).
In the operation of collecting or archiving there is a political dimension, since it introduces meaning, order, categories, coherence, consistency, etc. in that which was chaotic, confused or disparate. And this task is present in the process of artistic creation. Let us not forget that the ordering of the chaotic has a positive effect. The chaos is usually experienced as threatening. But in contemporary art the reworking of the past, as Mieke Bal reminds us, sometimes evaporates the images as they were before the artistic intervention, creating a “Preposterous History” (Bal 1999). In this case, creation changes the dynamics of the archival specialist as curator-conservator. The complex ways in which art acts on its predecessors indicates that it is the past, not the present, that is conditioned by a perpetual flux (Bal 1999), offering an interesting perspective to our study. In the Spanish bibliography, Guasch (2011) wrote a classic book; she started from the idea of documents that served to reconstruct the past as a counter-offensive to the threat of destruction and forgetting of memory, but not of an archive of artworks for social change. The combination of both perspectives is developed with enormous effectiveness in the book Autonomous Archiving (Artikişler Collective 2016), specifically in the 10 thesis on the Archive offered by Anand (2016). Two of them are anchored in the emotional starting point of La Manada City and justify our research: thesis 7 “The image is not just the visible, the Text is not just the Sayable” and thesis 3 “The directions Archiving will be Outward, not Inward” (Anand 2016). Thesis 7 implies the need to understand what is hidden under the words painted in La Manada City, while thesis 3 places us in the situations of making visible and public the violence (although, we will see, with some limitations).
Another very interesting point regarding the archive and its political dimension implies that the archive can be “decolonized” (Tan 2016, Mbmbe 2015). In this sense, like maps, it is the product of a gaze, and is the political visual outcome of a conception of the world. That relationship of the archive to the territory is dissected in a very effective way by Bastian (2014): origin and authority converge in the idea of archive and map. This creates a paradox: at the same time that the archive must be open, there is a trend that records must stay where they have been taken or created. The relationship of the archive and the map is clear and explicit.
Group violence, systemic violence and feminist responses may be another field in which La Manada City can make a contribution. As we said previously, on the occasion of the sexual predator of La Manada, efforts have been made in Spain to bring together feminist actions in a publication (Gómez Nicolau et al. 2021). However, the subtle group violence that occurs in institutions is more difficult to detect. It is now when we think we must explore the bibliography in Spanish about systemic or group harassment. In December 2022 the Spanish translations of practically all of Leymann’s writings has been published independently, which is good news because much of the bibliography on workplace bullying is based on his findings (Leymann and Navarrete 2022). On the other hand, the specific case of violence in organizations has an important body of work in the Spanish literature based on international conferences where artistic expressions have been used as a response to group bullying (Peña Saint Martin and López Marroquín 2022, Rodríguez-Cunill 2019 and 2021a).
All this background has an impact on the main objective of this work: the linguistic revision of a complex pictorial artwork, which contains evolved characteristics of archival art and cartographic, urban, architectural and geographical elements in the form of an imaginary (and unfortunately not so imaginary) map on group violence. The map is developed specifically in the artistic, university and anti-women sphere, but also operates, as we shall see, at different levels (from the autographical, to the community, local and global).
We will trace the path from the language used to the conclusions about the value of this artwork as mean for surviving in a hostile environment. As some of us said (Rodríguez-Cunill 2021a), the Diary of Incidents, a tool for psychological and legal use in case of group harassment, was the original starting point for the creative process of Inma la Inmunda. Now, we will now inquire into the mental processes that underlie her creative labour in La Manada City.
2. Results
Here we have selected several aspects of our linguistic analysis focused on La Manada City.
2.1. Indexical elements: labels and accusing hands
The first analysis comes from the way in which a series of hands converge with labels from Google Earth or Google Maps Satellite View in a given area of the map. In the same posture as an accusation, a cluster of hands points the spaces that are verbally described with the markers (with labels of denominations in English, Spanish, and the number of reviews). For our research, we have ordered and named each quadrant (corresponding to each panel). Moreover, we have placed the accusing hands in white and the labels with the information in black (
Figure 5).
We started from the question: are the names of the places in the map related to the origin of the painted hands (which, as we knew, corresponded to hands from Murillo’s paintings). To answer the question, we searched among the painter’s artworks, established an order of quadrants, and located the paintings from which the hands in the map came (
Table 1).
The review of this information and the bibliographic search gives us as a result that although there has been an interest in making the location of the hands coherent, and all of them have been made from Murillo's paintings, the relationships that are established with the names of the places that they point out on the map are not uniform. For example, it is fruitful to think of the angel's hand in The Annunciation as a warning in the expression "Woe Betide You", and not as an announcer, but we do not believe that the usual contemporary visitor can arrive at that interpretation from the act of reading the map. Other example: a shadow of uneasiness might appear in us upon seeing that St. Joseph in The Holy Family with a Bird, thanks to his accusing finger, would lead us to the Psychosocial Risk Promotion Service, as if something of psychological risk could exist in the Holy Family. We sincerely believe that these conclusions would not be very accurate and that the reality is that in this work of art, which took three years to be elaborated, it is more likely that the reasons for selecting the hands were compositional. Therefore, this research path has not given more results than the confirmation of the referential origin of the paintings from which the hands come from.
2.2. Linguistic dynamics according to semantic fields
The analysis of streets, monuments, squares, sites of interest, etc. has given us numerous results. We established key questions to infer which questions the names painted on the map might answer. This provided us with a total set of 10 terminology clusters that reveal a way of thinking about violence, of which the names of streets and other sites of interest are a response (
Table 2).
Through this table, we did conclude relevant aspects about the mind that had created this map of violence. It may be one of the most intriguing traits for the visitor/reader of La Manada City map, since connotations are present in the dynamics of reception, and reading gives value to the strength of this map, which, as we have said, is based on the objective of making concealed violence visible.
Indeed, we do observe some general trends that reveal a structured thought, since the streets, roads, monuments, etc., respond to the key questions that we have deduced from the semantic fields finally defined in points 1 to 10. Therefore, we understand this pictorial work as a testimony and study of a wide spectrum of harassment, from the autobiographical experience to the level of violence against the planet.
In the autobiographical aspects, we have been able to point out local references (group 7). For example, the parallelism between the Pantheon of Illustrious Manadians constitutes a veiled reference to the Faculty of Fine Arts in Seville, whose basements house the
Pantheon of Illustrious Sevillians. The local has a lot of strength here (note 1 of
Table 2), and autobiographical thought of the artist, who passed the Sevillian academic path.
Now we begin to understand the communicational strength of this artwork. Linguistically it is so impressive that the visual aspects will have to be analysed in another article. Among the semantic fields broken down in
Table 2, some of them show certain pedagogical intentions, as they are “connectors with reality”, such as the terminology related to criminal acts (abduction, mistreatment, torture…) in the group 5, those that direct us to the symptoms suffered by the victims (group 6) and therefore entering a field of subjectivity. In this sense, another level of subjectivity is established when the narrator/artist becomes –in a certain way- a “judge” of those guilty of violence, and terms loaded with negativity appear (group 4). This is not totally odd, since in the emotional terrain the harassing groups usually manage the collective indignation against the workplace bullying target, and this can be a response –the one elaborated from the target/artist- to that violence (Peña Saint Martin 2017).
It is true that more cryptic elements appear on the surface of the map, but we must consider that while this map was being elaborated as a way to make visible the hidden violence, it also involved a risk for the author, and hence writing the names of the streets and monuments in English rather than Spanish. After the experience of the exhibition Maculadas sin Remedio, the use of English means a protection in her field of action as an artist.
The pedagogical intention is also revealed through the terminology established from the patriarchal power (groups 1,2,3). It serves to detect these language traps, now insinuated in a creative way. Thus, as we said before, group 4 seems to be a response from outside the patriarchal power, and group 10 addresses feminist terminology. In addition, the enormously sad and pessimistic aspect of some streets is materialized in the maximum violence of death and its transition (group 9) and becomes more general looking at the future of the planet (group 8), including some notes on the recent pandemic. The Global Conscience Dump, the Arsonist of Mother Earth Avenue or the Swamp of Extermination lead us to the author’s saddest and most generalizing thinking.
2.3. Literary Devices
Literary devices provide us with emotional effects with artistic qualities, beyond the literalness of walls, pavers and sidewalks. The metaphors are repeated, in variations along the streets. In fact, the structures are all metaphors (the street of… implies an identification, as it is not “the street of cobblestones”). The literary devices are techniques for guiding in how to read the painting. Due to their quality of connection, these literary devices lead us to a reading of the map beyond the stones or walls of the city of the violence.
These literary devices lead the reader into an artistic universe. Reality does not appear as it is, but we feel it (
Table 3).
If we think of the examples on the map, the Metaphors of surreal resonances (group 1) lead us to spaces where each names could be a title of a painting or a poem. Thanks to the repetition (group 2), in the Great Grand-Grand Principal, we are referred to the idea of inbreeding, of nepotism, an issue that appears in other areas of the map. However, the repetition of the roots of the two first nouns in the Feminist of Feminism Ghetto refers to the idea of authenticity. On the other hand, the irony of the Feminist of Patriarchy Park (
Figure 6) (in group 5) leads us to the sense of falsehood and betrayal by the inclusion of two opposites.
The idioms and set phrases submerge the reader in a habitual process of thinking. But if they are modified, the sense of uncertainty, of instability, of unease, becomes more acute and is projected to the reader/viewer (group 3). The feeling of strangeness or veiled threat also happens in antithesis, such as Mute Tongue Alley or Disbelief Auditorium.
The opposition in the connotations of the terms used (for example in group 5) are also directed to understand that a concept that is said is the contrary to what it seems. For instance, we are not going to recover as patients in a centre for tears if these tears are actually faked, pretended; or a Psychosocial Risk Service is not going to protect us from the risks if this Service promotes them, instead of prevent them: Psychological Risk Promoting Service (
Figure 7).
In Dystopian Present Street, we have to understand that Dystopia (as Utopia) is a vision on the future (
Figure 8a), but in this case, it becomes present. Or in a school, democratic principles are taught as an illusion (
Figure 8b).
This stylistic resource leads us to a greater sense of truth because it connects with the intelligence of the receptor, making him/her a participant of a secret (what is, and does not seem to be, according to Greimas and Courtés, 1979). The semiotic square of veridiction shows the conflict between being and seeming. In Greimassian modalities, the secret is but does not seem to be, the falsehood is not, but seems to be, the truth is and seems to be, meanwhile the lie seems to be, but is not (Greimas and Courtés, 1979). If we participate in a secret, we will feel the truth more intensively than the mere truth.
In this emotional accompaniment to the reader of the map, the personification (group 6) helps to transfer feelings, because the streets are contaminated by human actions, like a dock that can make decisions, or a building that can erase slanders. The universe of sensibility accompanies the reading of this complex and forceful artwork. Anand’s 7th thesis comes true: “The image is not just the Visible, the Text is not just the Sayable” (Anand 2016).
2.4. Around the name Inma la Inmunda
Inma la Inmunda is a registered trademark used to work with the traces of violence (anonymous threatening messages, remains of pill blisters packs, denigrating reports…), represented in a logo with a dung beetle that models the detritus on the ground into a perfect sphere (
Figure 9).
Inma la Inmunda has been the signature of several former works, such as the 2017 audio-installation Invisibilization (Rodriguez-Cunill 2021a). The first record of actions under this artistic name dates from 2015, in the presentation of Inma la Inmunda and the Esquizos (Casa Grande del Pumarejo 2016). A second video-recording (from 2016) is preserved on the occasion of the performance for the audio-installation Noise for those who do not want to listen to (Rodríguez-Cunill 2017). The same year, a text about her opinions in the Murillo Year event is published (La Inmunda 2017). The diffusion of Inma la Inmunda’s name grew due to the media effect of Maculadas sin Remedio (Ceballos 2018).
The idea of a beetle working on the soil, mumbling and chewing the detritus in the darkness of the terrain, is presented in the form of sounds in the installations named above. These Humm, MMMNN sounds, among the words of the interior monolog of the insect, coincide with the nasal consonants that form the name INMa la INMuNda.
La Manada and the Manadians also share the nasality of this alliteration (a literary device) that we have wanted to treat specifically, due to its transcendence in the meaning of Inma la Inmunda’s universe. Let's keep in mind that the works signed under the pseudonym Inma la Inmunda are specifically those that deal with the demon of violence in the artist's life. However, other works that lack that dimension are signed under the name Inma la Magnánima (Inma the Magnanimous), with the opposite adjective to filth (Cunill 2021). Even in this last case, the mumbling of nasal sounds persists.
Finally, it is necessary to emphasize that the continuous process of the humble dung beetle's work in the dark is a metaphor for the same process of the artist, working anonymously, under a pseudonym, largely in times of confinement, and using a language on the map that is not her mother tongue, in order to protect herself against possible attacks.
3. Confronting violence through maps and archives
Historically and occasionally, the idea of the city represented in art and literature has served to emphasize other possible realities, in which the oppression of the real system of coexistence is transformed into something else. In this sense, the artistic and literary achievements represent a dissent from the system, and depending on their characteristics and work methodology, they may have required interdisciplinary work. Except for the artistic work that is our object of study (La Manada City), we do not know of any case in which the Diary of Incidents, a systematized form of organization of information for purposes of psychological and legal defence against moral harassment, has given rise to the visualization of a city of violence.
Following Bal (1999), the images created by Inma la Inmunda involve an active reworking of the predecessors, since the starting point is a commemorative occasion of revival Baroque in Seville. The gender theories point out a gap in the mainstream, dedicated to glorify the painter who becomes the brand image of the city.
Seville is a city of strong baroque ecclesiastical heritage, which still keeps inertias of the Holy Inquisition. The most representative temples of the city are extremely golden, and so the bright and dazzling appearance that Inma la Inmunda has given to La Manada City is. Yet, the stylistic resource of the antithesis happens utterly, because the attractive surface is completely discordant with the horrible reality that is reflected in the names of the streets and buildings. Seville can be considered a model of this oppression, as these bright and golden features were exported as a symbol of power and religious supremacy by the various Catholic orders in colonizing actions, both in Latin America (Cabeza and Almodovar 2018) and Asia (Cabeza 2019).
The way in which we review the past through this map (which is the result of an archival work) makes us see our predecessors in a different way. For the archival work that underlies this map, it has been necessary to make decisions and create categories, albeit unconsciously, because they have come to light through our linguistic analysis. But what the artist has archived are not objects, but situations of violence. She has collected the blister packs of swallowed pills (these were not organized alphabetically, but simply accumulated: unlike historians, artists do not have the firm decision to carry out the archival work). Inma la Inmunda stored the situations data, and accumulated (not collected in an orderly fashion) the blister packs, those discarded objects that in principle had no importance whatsoever. But, as we saw, the acts of archiving introduce meaning, order, limits, coherence, in a flow of contingency, confusion and lack of boundaries. They are thus positive, because, as we saw previously, the contingent and confused are often menacing (Alphen, 2008). The necessary archival work of the Incident Diary in which agents, effects, times, etc. of continued over time situations of violence are organized, is the prehistory of this complex work on group violence.
On the other hand, the impulse to archive, which has many antecedents in post Second World War art, manifests a will to make prevalent historical information that has often been lost, marginalized, or suppressed (Foster 2004). In contrast, in the case of La Manada City, what is revealed are the traces of processes of violence that precisely its authors would desire to obliterate. Normally, whoever constructs a document -if his/her intentions are legitimate-, wants a trace of it to remain and to be preserved.
In another vein, in the case of La Manada City, the literary devices play a protective role at times, even if the denunciation exists. The fear intrinsic to the creation of La Manada City leads its creator to clothe the appearance of the city of violence with beauty. In turn, the surface serves as a lovely lure to the reader-viewer, as his retina is caught by so much dazzling gold and other imitations of precious metals.
This consequence of our study leads us to conclude that among the possible continuations of research is the idea of subversion through brilliance, as opposed to the gold traditionally associated with power in the history of art.
Given the implications of archival art, denunciation, violence, propaganda, branding of cities and maps, it seems pertinent to compare La Manada City with another map made almost simultaneously in Norway.
A year after the exhibition of the two first panels of
La Manada City, the activist Markus Moestue released his map of Oslo to the media (
Figure 10).
That map contravened the standard of tourist maps. It revealed the darkest and most shameful parts of Oslo. Moreover, Moestue hoped that his map would inspire others to show the dark side of their cities (Frank 2020). Indeed, Moestue confessed: “Why make this map? In most countries, what we are taught about our own nation in school does not correspond much to reality. And Norway is no exception. We are made to believe in myths surrounding our own nation and are given a perfect mirage of excellence and good intentions in our history lessons. Stories of abuse, greed and war are often swept under the carpet, and it seems that, by some twist of faith, we are born into the best country in the world, and that all other nations are beneath us. Is Norway really the most happy [sic] place, the most environmentally conscious, the most peace loving or the most ethical? Hardly! In this map I aim to correct a few myths, point to some problematic aspects of Norway and Oslo. And I wish for this map to be a contrast to the mindless commercially motivated map you’ll receive at the tourist information centre. The aim is to make this map available to tourist and others on line, but also on printed paper in touristic locations such as hostels or bars in Oslo. Do you own such a place in Oslo? Please get in touch if you want to offer your guests a free non-comercial [sic] tourist map” (Moestue 2021).
Although La Manada City has similarities with Moestue's work, it shows important differences, since our map accentuates, together with criticism, an artistic dimension that is not so present in Moestue's case. Oslo's map is essentially a denotative map and highlights the lie: the emblematic buildings look like one thing, but they are another (remind Greimas and Courtés 1979). The 'honourable' spaces of the city are depicted as symbols of inequality, injustice, aggression against minorities, etc. For example, the monument to the national hero Tordenskiold is commented by emphasizing that he was a colonial-era slaver; or the objectives of the Nobel Peace Centre are questioned by highlighting the falsehood of the myth of Norway as a peace-loving nation, after having supported the bombing of Serbia, or the attack on Afghanistan by helping the United States.
Unlike Moestue's map, our research has indeed led to the establishment of thought processes on violence that are highly artistic, both by examining the names painted on the map and by asking what question they could answer. Firstly, this map makes violence visible in several ways: by asking who says what (who being the subject from which the ways are named and what the ways themselves), from where it is said, how it is shown linguistically at the denotative and connotative level and what relation to reality (autobiographical of the author, local, community or regional, planetary or global) it is put into practice. Secondly, the map shows the effectiveness of the message: surprising the reader with word games and literary devices, insinuating more than explicitly showing, and in short making the receiver feel smarter than when simply reading a street map to orient himself in a city.
4. Confronting violence and concealment: feminism, recursiveness and surrealism in The Manada City
To conclude this manuscript, we pose certain questions.
Regarding feminism: is the map a feminist work? Some time ago, we wondered whether feminist writing existed in Spain at the end of the twentieth century (López-Cabrales 2014). The results at the time were contradictory, as Spanish women writers were situated between an aversion to being labelled as 'feminists' (understood then as radical politics and even lesbianism) and feeling that as women they had accomplished quite a lot. Events such as the spread of La Manada-style predators have proved to be a revulsive, not only for the feminist movement, but for the concrete creation of La Manada City. As a literary work, the street map of La Manada City is a poetic journey that sinks its feet in the encyclopaedic eagerness (very masculine) and surrealism (as a way to overcome the experience of harassment). Intersected by the fact of being a woman, of not having been born where the harassment took place, for developing her artistic and professional work in a patriarchal environment and with great influence of Catholicism, the work of In-ma La Inmunda is a unique product that deserves more research (such as the meaning of gold in the work, not as a subsidy of power, but as a subversion, a practical alliance with other minorities on the planet who have within their reach shiny discarded objects that, although not composed of this precious metal, bring out a discourse of luxury in poverty and/or precariousness).
What are the future possibilities of this work in progress if, like traditional archives, it manifests a dynamic of concealment? We have rescued a work that is not exhibited in its entirety, and that deals with such problematic issues for the environment where it was born, that it has difficult exhibition possibilities. However, this does not prevent us from recognizing a completely new expression that reworks issues of the past, that denounces and seeks beauty in an environment of violence. Certain correspondences with reality seem to be found in the map, but they are cryptically established, as if the author were protecting herself. This is the same protective effect as the apotropaic elements, whose linguistic forms use stylistic devices such as periphrasis or puns to evade the danger from the outside. On the other hand, we have the suspicion that certain Spanish names of Catholic ancestry written on the map may hide agents of the gang of harassment, a question that in some interview the author has insinuated with the case of the name Angels (Harassing Angels Chapel). Even on the visual level, there are portraits of possible stalkers cannot be recognized (the fact of acknowledging them could give rise to a real danger in the artist's life), and other forms of human members that give us clues of a more than uncomfortable reality: this happens in the phallic Stained-Mouth Prick Memorial or in those small blurred portraits of the Feminists of Patriarchy Park label (
Figure 6).
What are the future possibilities of this work in progress if, like the actual archives, it manifests an outward dynamic?
Each of the spaces on this map may contain the germ of more works (the titles of the streets and other points hint at the possibility of new creations, in the manner of an analogical hypertext). We are convinced that La Manada is a model of maximalist principles applied to painting. On occasions, the artist has demonstrated against the authoritarianism "of Ikea", of a minimalism that has nothing to say. And it is clear that Inma la Inmunda has a lot to tell. There are too many aspects and nuances that emerge from the experiences of group violence maintained over time. On the other hand, as we have seen, the map and the street map have an encyclopaedic ambition, and it is still a work in progress.
One of the problems with the resolution of group violence today is its recursive nature. A complaint can become whatever the harassers need to protect themselves in the next step of violent group action. Compared to tools that organize the victim's testimony of violence (the Incident Diary), La Manada City offers a multiple visualization of a prolonged harassment over time. Its usefulness is greater from the point of view of survival of the victims, who know that group harassment does not stop in time if there is no forceful institutional action. And it is difficult to deny what has been expressed in poetic form, which engenders by connotations more a sense of truth than by denotations.
The archival art that has shown us the text-image interaction is presented in La Manada City at an evolved level, since its elements are not only presented, like the items of an archive, but there is an artistic reworking of them until they become a city as a whole.
The surrealist path appears to be the right one in the inward-outward dynamic of this archive-map-painting. It is not only that Inma la Inmunda's previous work contains surrealist traits, as we have seen. It is that the city of Seville itself, with its powerful ecclesiastical presence and its rites as a mode of socialization, offers a vision to the foreigner that acquires those effluvia that we are not living something real. When the surrealist poet Oliverio Girondo wrote his poem "Sevillano" (Sevillian), his images could seem surreal to any foreigner, but any inhabitant of Seville could understand all the elements found in its everyday life (López Cabrales 1995).
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, M.M.L.-C. and I. R.-C.; methodology, J.M.C.-L.; software, J.M.C.-L; formal analysis, M.M.L.-C., I. R.-C. and J.M.C.-L.; investigation, M.M.L.-C. and I. R.-C.; resources, I. R.-C.; writing—original draft preparation, M.M.L.-C., J.M.C.-L., and I. R.-C.; writing—review and editing, I. R.-C.; visualization, I. R.-C.; supervision, M.M.L.-C. and I. R.-C; project administration, I. R.-C; funding acquisition, M.M.L.-C. and I. R.-C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research was funded by EU, NextGenerationEU, throughout Ministerio de Universidades and University of Seville, grant number 19994.
Data Availability Statement
Not applicable.
Acknowledgments
Authors appreciate the wisdom and experience of Mr. Aitor Lanjarin-Encina and the Department of Art and Art History of the Colorado State University, the help and generosity of Mr. Jonathan Carlyon, Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Colorado State University, the open-mindedness and efficacy of Erin Tomkins (International Student and Scholar Services of CSU), and Gretchen Zarle-Lightfoot (assistant to the editor of Confluencia, Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura). Moreover, we would like highlighting the extraordinary assistance of the International Women’s Club of Fort Collins International Center, specially from Sara Hunt. We cannot forget the expertise and kindness of Karen Smith (English teacher in Fort Collins International Center) and our deep love to the outstanding ELS instructor Andrea Heyman. In addition, we thank the careful and generous work of the staff from Front Range Community College in Fort Collins.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Notes
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[1]Girondo's poem entitled “Sevillano” gives us signs of this reality of rites that, if you are not familiar with the city of Seville, may seem surreal. "Sevillano"/ In the atrium: a veritable gathering of blind men, even with a badge, a pack of children, barking for a bitch/ The church is refrigerated so that the votive offerings of eyes and arms don't melt ... / Beneath their stiff mantles, virgins raise ruby tears. Some have ponytail hair. Others wear their hearts like a cushion of pins / A cowbell of keys permeates the gloom with a heavy sacristy odor. An ancestral orangutan revives in an old woman when she crosses her forehead./And meanwhile, in front of the high altar, the women's genitals liquefy contemplating a crucifix that bleeds from its sixty-six ribs, and the priest chews a prayer as if it were a "chewing gum". Translated into English by Cabeza-Lainez. Available in Spanish in: . https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxiaWJsaW90ZWNhZGlnaXRhbDMyYnxneDoxYjgzYThkMzQ0ZDRiZWQ4
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