The museum project of the Cases Barates: An actor in the semantic space of the Barcelona housing conflict

The Barcelona Museum of History has hosted, since 2023, a project dedicated to the history of housing in Barcelona during the 20th century. For this purpose, a group of cheap houses (cases barates) in the working-class neighborhood Bon Pastor, built in 1929 as part of a social housing public program, were converted into museum space. The group of houses will survive the urban renovation project of the Municipality, which involves substituting the 784 original single-plane houses with apartment buildings. The current relevance and scale of the housing conflict in Barcelona inevitably pose a discursive challenge for the museum, whose declared aim is to explicate aspects of the city. The museum avoids taking a stance on controversial issues; nevertheless, the act of enunciation itself makes it an actor in the conflict. How is language neutralized to serve this contradiction? This paper proposes a study of the language of the museum through the perspective of argumentative semantics and, more specifically, the theoretical framework developed by Marion Carel and Alfredo Lescano. Drawing from the problematics of New Museology, we analyze how the museum positions itself as an actor in the housing conflict and identify aspects of the Real of the conflict ‒ concepts that are naturalized by the museum as a state institution. To do this, a corpus of texts from the museum exhibition is studied, focusing on their argumentative content and the formal aspects of the enunciation.