Alba Solà Garcia

Alba Solà Garcia (Barcelona, 1986) received a BA in Humanities (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2009), where she won a grant for an academic stay in the Universidad de las Américas (Puebla, Mexico). She specialized in literary analysis (MA in Creative Writing, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2010) and Latin American literature and culture (MA in Latin American Studies, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2011). Her research interests focus on cultural production, urban studies, dictatorial repression, and collective memory in Hispanic and Latin American contexts. 

 

Through intense archival research and built upon cultural, urban and memory studies, and oral interviews, her dissertation Campesinos, punks y charnegos. Luchas autónomas por la descolonización del pasado y del territorio en las periferias urbanas de Barcelona (1970-1992) proposes a counter-history of the transitional period from Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975) to democracy through the analysis of Barcelona’s urban peripheries and its cultural production. The city’s margins, built upon rural mass migration, produced a singular culture that contests the official historical discourse mobilized by the transition and its consensus, refusing the widely shared paradigm of rupture among both periods. The archive explored and presented in her dissertation, conformed by independent films, countercultural fanzines, and materials produced by social movements from the 70s to the 90s, configures another collective memory of Barcelona, visualizing the continuity of a systematic violence, silenced by a common celebratory discourse of progress and capitalist modernization. Complementing her research, she developed the digital archive Memorias de la periferia de Barcelona (1959-1992), an awarded Digital Humanities project (2018-2019): https://memoriasdelaperiferia.com/