Migrant Trajectories in Barcelona
A Decolonial Atlas
by Manú Bartlett
Community Workshop at Futch
This section displays the maps and palimpsests created during and following the Queer Migrant Critical Cartography Workshop which I ran in March 2021 at Futch Club in Barcelona.
Background on Futch:
Since December 2020 I have been carrying out part-time participant observation at Futch Club which is a Queer Space in Barcelona. Futch Club is a relatively new space, launched in the summer of 2020 with the intention of providing an inclusive, safe, creative and open space & network for all Queer people in Barcelona. Futch club describes themselves as a space for those who are often excluded “shared among participants @futchclub does not even belong to its members, it is instead a celebration of those that don't belong, a party for who's never invited anywhere, a place for bodies that have no gender, identity or belonging(s).” Diana one of the co-founders who defines as a Queer Migrant rapper, explained to me that Futch allows her to “speak from my perspective and reality and from needs”. The majority of the members of Futch Club are migrants and part of their implicit focus is to create a space for those looking for Queer Kinship and community.
The name Futch Club tells us a great deal about the space’s intentions. The Urban Dictionary defines Futch as ‘Futch (adjective) describes: a) a non-standard display of female masculinity, which contains elements of the feminine (such as clothing, walk, cosmetics, shoes). The definition continues: ‘If butch/femme is a spectrum, a futch may be found at any or all of the points in between. A futch presentation may occasionally be ephemeral, caused by the migration of an woman's queer self-identity, but is much more likely to be ongoing and deliberate; reflecting an individual's own position of comfort on the queer gender presentation scale.’
The name Futch thus represents both the transient nature of Queer Kinship and reflects Futch Club’s position as a physical space within a highly transient city and social context; many Queer Migrants to Barcelona stay for a short period of time. By celebrating this ephemeral nature instead of rallying against it, Futch Club reflects the adaptive, inventive and ever-changing nature of Queerness. This is particularly true for Queer Migrants whose transitory experience with gender, place and sexuality is ever present.
The Workshop
The photos below show the setting of the Community Workshop held at Futch in March 2021. The first image is of the flyer that I put together with the help of the Futch team. The other photos show workshop participants explaining their maps to the group.
At the beginning of the workshop, we ran through a few collective agreements which all participants in the space agreed upon, including: Only use I statements; Be respectful of people’s pronouns; We are all equals, we are all teachers and students. I got this idea from classmate Jason who gave me advice on community mapping workshops.
Personal Queer Migrant Trajectory Maps
Maps N.5 - N.10
The images below are the personal Queer Migrant Trajectory maps that the workshop participants created in response to the question 'How did you come to Futch?', this open question allowed for a diverse interpretation among the participants. Some focused on the spaces and feelings that they had passed through that day to arrive to the workshop; while others focused on their migratory journey or their coming out story.
Queer Migrant Community Palimpsests
Map N.11 + N.12
Palimpsests are defined by the Oxford dictionary as ‘a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document’, they can also be defined more broadly as ‘something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form’. It is clear that the key word in these definitions is ‘re-use’; both of the palimpsests displayed have re-used the base map of Barcelona as a counter mapping strategy to emphasise the needs and experience of the Queer Migrant community.
Community Mapping is a great way of visualising affective experiences of time; these palimpsests show both the past, ongoing and future trajectories of Queer Migrants in Barcelona. Furthermore, drawing upon Pickles’ description of the spatial turn in social theory, these palimpsests attempt to show that ‘contingent knowledge may be seen as embodied and locally constructed’.
The first palimpsest was created in the Community Workshop held at Futch in March. A group of 5 participants worked together to re-define the base map of the city, suggesting new ideas to 'Queer' the city. For instance, creating a big park which would take over the poshest area of the city and to create a safe space for Queer people on the beach.
The second palimpsest I created myself, using 3 scales of spatial identification in the city; firstly the same black and white base map of the city which I used in the community workshop; this base map is overlayed with partially transparent maps: a floor plan of Futch's physical space and four of the personal 'Queer Migrant Trajectory Maps' that the participants made in the workshop. I intentionally placed some of the maps upon the base-map in locations which featured landmarks, for instance, one of the maps spoke about the coloniality of Barcelona and the Columbus statue. Other maps were placed at random throughout the city to represent the non-spatial connection to place that citydwellers hold to the urban space as an 'Imagined Community’. Furthermore, by almost covering the base map with these drawings of Queer meaning, the palimpsests' design is in itself an act of reclaiming and queering the city. The blurriness of the palimpsest is also in line with Queer Decolonial methodologies which aim to disrupt western ideas of the purpose of cartography. Finally, this palimpsest allows the audience to understand the micro, meso and macro spatial relationships at play in the community workshop.
