Spectacular Modernities: Buenos Aires Across the Arts, 1921-1939

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"Spectacular Modernities: Buenos Aires Across the Arts, 1921-1939" probes the intricacies of postcolonial urban modernity by studying key representations of the iconic city of Buenos Aires in the interwar period, coming from a number of artistic disciplines (poetry, novel, painting, feature film, documentary, music, photography). By the 1920s, massive immigration from Europe transformed Buenos Aires into the largest and most cosmopolitan urban centre of Latin America, and launched a series of vexed sociopolitical, ideological and cultural issues that occupied the minds of the politicians, intellectuals and artists of the time. The project focuses on urban space as a cognitive map of modernity's new realities and investigates how modernization and immigration impacted Argentina's cultural and ideological consciousness in this period by examining together, for the first time, a number of pivotal works of internationally renowned figures, namely Jorge Luis Borges, Xul Solar, Oliverio Girondo and Roberto Arlt, as well as of important artists who have been neglected in the English-speaking world - José Ferreyra and Horacio Coppola. The project explores the ideological, social and aesthetic agendas that lay behind these works, which developed as a response to a wide and diverse range of questions related to nationhood, immigration, modernization, social marginalization, utopianism, anarchism and technological advancements, among others. Its aim is to cast new light on the contrasting facets of postcolonial modernity and offer fresh perspectives on Argentina's urban modernity in particular, while resituating Latin American urban culture within the wider interdisciplinary research in urban studies. This is the first work on Argentine urban modernity that combines close analyses of major representations of Buenos Aires from different artistic disciplines and a theoretically informed discourse that draws on the latest developments in urban theory and postcolonial and decolonial studies (Latin America's response to postcolonial theories) as well as on other relevant theoretical concepts, some of them contemporary with the works under consideration, coming from the fields of Philosophy, Architecture, Sociology, Geography, Semiotics, International Studies, and Literary and Cultural Studies, among others. The research outputs will benefit both the academic community (in particular, those interested in Latin American studies, urban studies, postcolonial/decolonial studies, cultural history, cultural theory and identity studies), the public sector and the wider general public, with a six-chapter monograph (I have a proposal with Texas University Press), an international interdisciplinary conference on Buenos Aires in the interwar period, a workshop on Borges and nationalism in the 1920s at StAnza (Scotland's international poetry festival), UK premiere screenings of Ferreyra's films of the 1920s, a UK premiere exhibition of Coppola's photographs published in _Buenos Aires: una visión fotográfica_ (1936) which is considered a milestone in the photography of the Americas, and a Scottish premiere exhibition of Xul Solar's fascinating paintings of the 1920s and 1930s. With the bicentenary celebrations of Latin American Independence still underway, this project will pay tribute to one of the most hegemonic cities of the Hispanic world and will provide a new conceptual framework for understanding the complexities of urban modernity in Latin America for academics and the wider public alike. In addition, the project will financially benefit local museums/galleries and regional communities, it will offer the opportunity to the wider public to appreciate some of the most extraordinary cultural accomplishments of Latin America, it will strengthen relationships between museums and galleries in the UK and Argentina, and will build collaborative networks of researchers based in the UK, USA, Canada and Latin America.