To exhibit the city is to tell a story—not only of architecture and infrastructure but of memory, desire, and power. This notion underpins the curatorial devices examined in three urban exhibitions that reframe the city as both object and subject of narration. Rather than presenting the city as a static backdrop, these exhibits activate it as a dynamic protagonist in a web of images, texts, and experiences. The authors argue that every curatorial gesture—what is selected, what is omitted, how things are displayed—produces a narrative about urban identity and collective belonging. These exhibitions, situated in Spanish and Latin American contexts, deploy maps, photographs, and testimonies not as neutral artifacts but as vehicles for political and cultural interpretation. They foreground tensions between past and future, visibility and exclusion, center and periphery. A particularly illustrative case is the use of archival materials in one exhibit to question dominant urban historiographies, revealing marginalized narratives and spatial injustices that persist beneath the city’s official façade. Thus, the city becomes legible not only through urban planning or statistical analysis but as a form of storytelling, where the politics of visibility determine whose voices shape urban imaginaries and whose are silenced.
Elizondo, G. and Rey, C., 2017. La ciudad como relato: tres dispositivos de exhibición para pensar la ciudad. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(2), pp.115–121.
