Distinctive culture: Framing flamenco artistry inPolígono Sur: El arte de Las Tres Milby Dominique Abel

Abstract

This article investigates how artistic, cultural and urban distinctiveness is constructed in Dominique Abel's film Polígono Sur: El arte de Las Tres Mil. The article introduces Abel's film into a wider debate about the potential of flamenco as a factor of cultural promotion for one of Spain's most notorious and stigmatized urban areas. Using this wider context as a starting point, the essay deploys Pierre Bourdieu's writings on distinction and taste to analyze how the polígono and flamenco artistry become multilayered points of reference that foster the creation and negotiation of distinctions from different perspectives throughout Abel's film. Firstly, I attend to the film's treatment of a concert that is organized as a promotional activity for Polígono Sur. Secondly, by attending to nonverbal performances and practices, I discuss how the film stages flamenco as a form of everyday artistry with relevant historical resonances. Thirdly, I show how the polígono emerges as a marker of positive distinction that motivates a specific circulation of affects within the artistic community of Polígono Sur. In sum, this article provides different readings of the ways in which distinctive musical qualities interact dialectically with socioeconomic marginality. KEYWORDSFlamenco; distinction; Pierre Bourdieu; Polígono Sur; marginality 1964 saw the construction of the first houses of an urban project that is now widely known as a breeding ground of delinquency, drug trade and gang violence: Seville's Polígono Sur. Located on the southern fringes of the Andalusian capital, this agglomeration consists of roughly six different districts -each with a different name and distinctive urban architecture -that were built to house an already marginal population from other parts of the city (Comité René Cassin 13, 23). Murillo is the most notorious district of the Polígono, consisting of roughly 3000 apartments that were built as part of a social housing program in 1974 and that since then have synecdochically endowed the entire zone with its famous nickname Las Tres Mil Viviendas. Synecdoche, indeed, seems to be a common operation in Seville's urban imaginary. It is by means of synecdochic associations that Polígono Sur has been transformed into Las Tres Mil in a wider regional and national cultural imaginary,

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