ABSTRACT: Skies and Limits: Carla Subirana\'s \"Volar\" as Critical Spatial Practice

Skies and Limits:
Carla Subirana's Volar as Critical Spatial Practice

For the last forty years, the people of Spain have attempted to reckon with the legacies and impacts of a brutal civil war and over three decades of oppressive, authoritarian rule. Spanish cultural production and scholarship have tended to assess Spain's present relationship to its past conflicts vis-à-vis memory, whether national or personal; however, a focus on the spaces and sites within which the traces of such conflicts remain—as well as the spaces of representation that incubate critiques of them—can bring subjects and observers a fuller understanding of them and their contemporary impact. My analysis of Carla Subirana's documentary, Volar (2012), reveals how that film and the community from within which it emerged constitute two such critical spaces.
The field of Cultural Studies is indebted to Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault's penetrating analyses of the oppressive effects of spatial production, and due attention is being paid to the Franco regime's exercise of such control over Spaniards' everyday lives. My analysis goes further, bringing such theories of spatiality to bear on experimental documentary so as to interrogate one particular site. For the first time in history, Volar documents life inside a military academy in Spain, and thanks to its indexically potent body-camera footage and its creative palimpsests of sound and image, Subirana's film brings its viewers into co-presence with the spaces of the Academia General del Aire in San Javier, Murcia. Despite the seeming distance between viewer and filmed subject, Volar also reminds those viewers that the lives of the cadets and the spaces she films are not dissimilar from their own—or, more pointedly, from their parents' lives under Franco.