Framing Urban Communities

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Official website of the Leverhulme-funded project Comics and the Latin American City: Framing Urban Communities.

Buenos Aires 2017

April 27, 2017

The first network event, Graphic Cities, took place in Buenos Aires, August 2017, over 5 days. Key themes of the event included: cities in comics; decoding comics in physical urban landscapes; and comics in provincial cities. Project partners also reported on their research progress, undertook site-specific visits in Buenos Aires, and began to plan the Entreviñetas exhibit … More Buenos Aires 2017

Bogotá 2018

April 14, 2017

The second group event, The Cultural Capital of Comics (click here for a full overview of the week), took place in Bogotá from 24-29 September 2018, in collaboration with the Colombian comics festival Entreviñetas, directed by network partner Daniel Jiménez Quiroz. Network partners took place in a series of events, including an international academic event, El Cómic y … More Bogotá 2018

Manchester 2019

April 12, 2017

Over the past couple of decades Latin American comics have been undergoing something of a renaissance, evident in growing numbers of publications, festivals, and digital communities. Though we still cannot refer to comics industries, burgeoning transnational comics enterprises are shaping a regional comics discourse, and there is increasing international recognition for and collaboration with the … More Manchester 2019

La sudestada

La sudestada by Juan Sáenz Valiente is the story of a bitter, resentful and aging private detective. Employed to investigate a wealthy man’s wife, he traces the choreographer to a house in Tigre, the delta to the north of Buenos Aires, where she performs her expressionist dance forms in the mud and leaves of the verdant river landscape. As so often in Argentine culture, Tigre functions here as a kind of urban unconscious, the other space that throws the city into relief. But La sudestada is also full of meticulously drawn cityscapes, which capture the sense of city caught between an urbanism of the spectacle and the more chaotic, less iconic but ultimately more authentic images of water tanks, corrugated iron, washing lines, aircon units, weeds, pipes, wires, ladders, clothes and cables. Such images capture the materiality of what we might call ‘the urban unspectacle’.