"The preliminary condition required for propelling workers to the status of "free" producers and consumers of commodity time was the violent expropriation of their own time. The spectacular return of time became possible only after this first dispossession of the producer."
Society of the Spectacle, Spectacular Time -159 -, Guy Debord
"Baroque demands big cities, with lots of people and lots of money. Barcelona is not a big city, but it over-compensates with the premise of grand urban scenarios - parades, concerts, stadiums, parks, museums and stores that respond to well-tailored commercial and urbanistic legislation. All size extra-large. Barcelona doesn't have a lot of people, which is why importing people is its primordial objective. It doesn't have much space, either. But it does have money. This is the paradox of the city and the backdrop in which it evolves: With a population of a little less that two million, and with an always eroding economy, it has the formidable ability to promote its own dreams, chimera, panacea. Certainly Barcelona is one of the few European cities that has been able to invent itself as a transitable space, finding in Baroque, more often than it might think, solutions to questions of a historical, political and cultural order. And the whole world still loves it. As if Baroque were just that, a logo, to camouflage from us the truth that the entire cover-up is still Baroque."
Barcelona and the Paradox of the Baroque, Jorge Luis Marzo [full eng. text: PDF]
CYCLORAMA
ADVENTURES IN LEISURE TIMEBarcelona 2003 / 05