IMAGINARIES OF EMPTINESS: Exploring social imaginaries and concerns over crisis in contemporary rural Spain

Soriano Oliva, Anabel

4. term

Global Refugee Studies, Master

2021

2021-10-25

This thesis explores the relation between social imaginaries of emptiness and crisis in contemporary rural Spain. Particularly, it investigates the implications of framing a territory in process of depopulation or abandonment as empty/emptied throughout cultural representation. To do so, first, it examines the emptiness as a historical category to explore demographic trends as well as the representation of the rural world in the book La España Vacía. Viaje por un país que nunca fue. Second, based on Rancière’s aesthetics, it studies the emptiness as an ideological tool that shaped imaginarily and morphologically the territories that are labelled as such. Under the category the (re)distribution of the sensible (Rancière, 2004,2010) it looks into what is made visible through the photo’s different perspectives in the exhibition Sand Castles I and II and the main two characters in the novel Los Asqueroso. To read what both cultural representations made visible, an hermeneutic method is conducted to understand what are the social imaginaries (Castoriadis, 1987) that are inhabiting such territories. As a result, both abandoned territories unveil themselves as products of a historical past, and hence conformed by instituted imaginaries; but simultaneously, as a space to instituting new imaginaries, that is, as a place to imagine otherwise what is possible. Concluding that the emptiness symbolization of rural territories as in crisis belongs to exogenous voices, that by resorting to that emptiness, look for their own redemption in a future-yet-to-come.

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