‘No nos representan’: Political Imagination in Gran Hotel Abismo (2016) by Marcos Prior and David Rubín

Abstract

In a time of popular uprisings such as 15M and the Indignados movement, the Spanish cartoonists Marcos Prior and David Rubin visually recuperate Gyorgy Lukacs’s ‘ideological construct’, the ‘Grand Abyss Hotel’ (1984), in their graphic novel Gran Hotel Abismo (2016) to criticize similar contradictions and forms of exploitation that Lukacs addresses, but in the context of contemporary neoliberal Spain. In this article I address the political imagination in the graphic production of contemporary Spain and, particularly, in the graphic novel Gran Hotel Abismo by Prior y Rubin. In this sense I examine how the political shapes visual devices and cultural artifacts, and how the political repertoire of images, symbols and metaphors expresses three processes: precarization, memorialization and legitimation, and how these processes, as forms of politicization, are respectively articulated. Ultimately, I aim to analyse how political imagination affects graphic narratives such as Gran Hotel Abismo and how these narratives ‘interpellate’ readers and share a repertoire of the social movements in contemporary Spain that are used as tools of politicization in our society.