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| Four cities | | We each construe cities depending on the time we spend in them. Our protagonists are four: Donostia-San Sebastián, Palma, Santiago, and Zaragoza; and eight, the pairs of eyes and hands that have recreated them, written and drawn, so that we can see and feel them differently, from a new view point and with a different heart. |  Unpublished texts and illustration by four authors and four illustrators from differente regions of Spain:
Donostia-San Sebastián: "Empty construction" (text by Juan Kruz Igerabide, illustration by Elena Odriozola).
Palma de Mallorca: "The swifts, the sea and the rooftops stained with lichen" (text by Miquel Rayó, illustration by Max).
Zaragoza: "Frankfurt sausages" (text by Daniel Nesquens, illustration by Elisa Arguilé).
Santiago de Compostela: "Surprise inhabits Compostela" (text by Xosé A. Neira Cruz, illustration by Miguelanxo Prado).
Download extract in PDF  |  | | Illustrated cities | | Cities, when drawn by a cartographer, are little more than dots on a map. Fortunately illustrators are able to give them to life and colour so that they remain fixed in our memories. |  The four ages of all cities: Like women, cities have four ages.
1. When they are little they are cheerful and innocent, shining and dandy, always ready for a party if it weren’t that they hardly merit a speck on a map.
2. Sooner or later, they all reach the zenith of their youth, they flirt with artists who fill their dizzy heads with fluttering birds; they step outside, flap their wings a little and embark on a flight into the future...
Download extract in PDF | | | Interview with Jörg Müller: The Illustrated Time | | «God created nature, humans the cities and the devil the villages». German proverb. |  The first thing that draws our attention to this great Swiss illustrator is the validity that many of his books still retain. It is also surprising that he has only published seventeen books in thirty six years of work, of which only three are known in Spain. And that a work so objective and critical as his; so conscientious, exacting, meticulous and documented, that without knowing it we might imagine cold and calculated; might be capable of opening in the imagination of the spectator a world of sensations so rich and infinite. Is a great and gratifying surprise.
I think to have discovered his secret, or some of them, journeying through his cities. We wanted to talk with Jörg Müller (Lausanne, 1942) because, not one, or two or three, but infinite cities hide within and extend through his illustrations: as many as the layers that this labyrinthine illustrator possesses... think one moment in Das Buch im Buch im Buch (The book within the book, within the book). The cities of Jörg Müller are born, perish, transform, they lose themselves turning their own corners, they evoke past times broken by the wind or exhaling life’s aromas that smash against the pavement.
Download extract in PDF | | | Enrique Flores: with other eyes | | The writer Gustavo Martin Garzo projects his literary vista over the aesthetic chronical that Enrique Flores makes of cities. |  When Enrique Flores confronts a city he looks in a different way than we do when we contemplate the one we live in, but not differently to the way he focuses on anything he looks at. Something observed by him becomes in the same moment a subject of detailed attention, an assumed model to be «portrayed», fixed in an instant on a page of the notebook that is always with him.
The minaret of a mosque, the sea wall of a port, the crowd contemplating a street musician or a table on a pavement café, are all transferred on to paper by the intelligent stroke that contains the archaic beauty of the sketch, and the vitality of which is rarely translated to the final work.
Enrique anchors these models in the emptiness of the blank page, he suspends them in air, and he subjects them to his observation and his light tracings. They all proceed from his peculiar way of contemplating the world: with other eyes.
Download extract in PDF | | | Picture books reviews | | Architectures, monuments, noise, landscapes of possibility and risk, mythical cities, made myths. In the city networks are built, chaos is ordered. Territory for freedom, loneliness, speculation and games. |  If in fairy stories, the forest was the place in which you lost yourself (Little Red Riding Hood), the place you hide (Snow White), or the place in which you were abandoned (Hansel and Gretel), it was also the place in which prodigious and miraculous things happened: fairies lived in the torrents and gnomes in the holes in trees, enchanted birds would appear with golden plumage and ants counted grains of wheat in order to obtain the princess hand.
This place of enchantment and perdition, of possibility and danger has been substituted in the literature of today by cities which have become the natural stage where all these experiences can occur to the children that walk about them.
The city is another version of the forest in which children can live abandoned in the closest night, watched by shining beasts (De noche en la calle) or lost amongst the cruellest concrete unable to find a clear place to play (La calle es libre).
Download extract in PDF | | | #2 - The city | | Contents in this issue | Illustrated cities (Teresa Duran).
Interview with Jörg Müller (illustrator).
Enrique Flores' cities, text by Gustavo Martín Garzo.
4 cities:
- Zaragoza (Text by Daniel Nesquens / Illustration by Elisa Arguilé).
- Barcelona (Text by Miquel Rayó / Illustration by Max).
- San Sebastián (Text by Juan Kruz / Illustration by Elena Odriozola).
- Santiago de Compostela (Text by Xosé A. Neira Cruz / Illustration by Miguelanxo Prado).
Picture book's reviews: De noche en la calle, El cochinito de Carlota, La calle es libre, Madlenka, Elsa y Max de paseo por París, Tom, Un león en París, Desencuentros.
More information about issue #2 | | | Bloc #2: The City (editorial) | Ramon Gómez de la Serna said that «Cities are the collective memory». Perhaps it implies a partial memory, interested like all memories, but without doubt it’s the memory —in the sense of an inventory— of all those events that were concerned, and are concerned with what we call art, including in this concept, picture books.
This is why the magazine Bloc has decided to dedicate an issue to this place or site: the city as an aesthetic space, as a container of artistic and literary displays. Definitively an excuse, a pretext to look at how human beings continue to contribute to this collective memory.
It would be seen, in any case, that this form of human grouping, the city, that has never ceased to evolve and develop throughout history, and that, in this year 2008, according to the UNEPA (United Nations Population Fund) embraces more than half the world’s population, is not the best population grouping, neither does it respond to the needs of contemporary man. To the real necessities, those of the man who, in his current point of evolutionary development, as Luis Landero says, «has not yet learnt to live without his tail».
Individualism, loneliness, lack of communication, and all those components that characterize daily life in the great metropolis, still seem to appear huge to a human yearning for a rural medium that protected him and allowed him to refrain from confronting his liberty. Rural surroundings, clearly in retreat, in which silence is still tolerated, up against the citizen of today who needs to surround himself with noise. However it is, or precisely because of the multitude of contradictions that cities subject their inhabitants to, they provide a fertile terrain in terms of creation.
(Collaborations in this issue: A Mano Cultura, Emma Bosch, Marcela Carranza, Olalla Fernández, Juan Mata, Estrella Sánchez Marcos, Caterina Valriu Llinás, Leandro P. Vegas Úbeda) | |
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