This post is dedicated to the five Barcelonese that were especially relevant to the CGS project : Evru / Zush , Lluís Permanyer , Claudi Alsina, Colita, and Jorge Wagensberg . Together, they represent five different ways of understanding Barcelona: as an invented symbolic territory, a historical memory, a geometric structure, a photographed social body, and a system governed by form and complexity.
Evru / Zush — Albert Porta Muñoz
Barcelona, 1946–2025 · Visual artist
Born Albert Porta, he adopted the identity Zush in 1968 and later became Evru in 2001. He constructed an imaginary sovereign territory called the Evrugo Mental State , complete with its own flag, passport, currency, emblems and alphabet, called Asura . He described his later identity through the invented term ArtCienMist : artist, scientist and mystic.
His work combines biomorphic figures, invented writing, maps, bodily imagery, psychology, mysticism and private cosmology. Instead of treating symbols as representations of an outside world, he made them the infrastructure of a world of their own. His work entered collections including MACBA, MoMA, the Center Pompidou and the Reina Sofía.
Connection to CGS: He is the most direct parallel. Both autonomous projects involve symbolic languages, imaginary systems, divided or mutable identities, and a world that is generated through signs rather than merely illustrated by them. The important distinction is that the CGS system has its own terminology, compositional rules and narrative architecture; it should not be interpreted as derived from Asura or the Evrugo Mental State.
Lluís Permanyer
Barcelona, 1939–2025 · Journalist, essayist and urban chronicler
Permanyer spent roughly six decades writing about Barcelona and became widely known as his unofficial chronicler. He joined La Vanguardia in 1966 and produced more than eighty books, many devoted to the city’s streets, architecture, neighborhoods , bourgeois history, monuments and disappearing details.
His method combined archival investigation with walking, observation and anecdotal storytelling. He was interested not only in celebrated architecture but also in damaged façades, forgotten buildings, civic neglect, vanished customs and the small clues through which a city reveals its previous lives. He also wrote about figures such as Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies .
Connection to CGS: Permanyer is relevant to the idea that Barcelona is not simply its narrative’s location but its accumulated memory. The final transformation of the city into an unwritten living plate echoes his understanding of Barcelona as a layered text assembled from buildings, absences, stories and traces.
Claudi Alsina
Barcelona, 1952–2025 · Mathematician, educator and writer
Alsina was a mathematician and professor associated with the Universitat Polytechnic of Catalonia. His fields included mathematical visualization , functional equations, mathematical education, fuzzy logic, measurement and the geometry underlying Gaudí’s architecture. He has published more than fifty books and hundreds of academic and educational articles and became especially well known for making mathematics accessible without stripping it of imagination.
His studies of Gaudí explored how ruled surfaces, hyperboloids, helicoids, catenaries and other mathematical forms become architectural structures. He was therefore concerned with the transition from abstract relation to inhabitable form—the point at which geometry becomes material, spatial and experiential.
Connection to CGS: Alsina provides a bridge between the glyphic diagrams and Barcelona’s physical architecture. His work supports the idea that geometry can be more than decorative: it can generate structure, movement, stability and meaning. He was especially relevant to the “Gala” side of the book—measure, relation, architecture and intelligible form.
Little Tail — Isabel Steva Hernández
Barcelona, 1940–2023 · Photographer
Colita was one of Barcelona’s defining photographers. She documented the city’s cultural and political life, including the Gauche Divine , the Barcelona School of cinema, the Nova Cançó , flamenco performers, writers, artists, feminists and everyday urban communities.
Her photography ranged from intimate portraits to photojournalism and social documentation. She worked in an irreverent, politically engaged manner and was closely associated with democracy and feminist struggles. The University Autònoma de Barcelona recognized her contribution to the renewal of Catalan and Spanish photography and to women’s equality by awarding her an honorary doctorate.
One particularly relevant work is Antifémina , made with the writer Maria Aurèlia Capmany: a photographic and textual confrontation with the images and roles imposed on women under Francoism. Her archive also preserves performers, cultural personalities and transformations in Barcelona over several decades.
Connection to CGS: Colita represents the city as a body observed through people, gestures, resistance and social memory. Whereas Permanyer read Barcelona through buildings and histories, Colita read it through faces, performances and lived contradictions. She relates more strongly to Salvador’s domain of body, wound, memory and human presence.
Jorge Wagensberg
Barcelona, 1948–2018 · Physicist, museologist and scientific writer
Wagensberg was trained as a physicist at the University of Barcelona, where he later taught for decades. I have combined research and teaching with scientific communication and museum design. In 1991 he created the Science Museum of the “la Caixa” Foundation and directed its transformation into CosmoCaixa , which became an influential model of an interactive science museum.
His interests crossed physics, biology, evolution, complexity, form, uncertainty, creativity and the communication of scientific ideas. He has argued that museums should not merely transmit completed information but should produce stimuli, questions and intellectual encounters.
His thoughts repeatedly returned to how form emerges from natural laws, how complexity develops, and how knowledge grows through conversation, contradiction and contact with reality. He also wrote extensively for general readers and created the influential Metathemas science and philosophy collection.
Connection to CGS: Wagensberg is relevant to the book’s treatment of transformation as a system rather than a supernatural event. His work offers language for emergence, complexity, natural form and the role of the observer. My concept of the reader-as- Alchemist resembles his conception of the museum visitor: not a passive recipient but someone whose attention and interaction completes the experience.
The strongest conceptual pairing
For CGS, the five can be understood as a sequence:
Evru : the symbol creates a world.
Permanyer : the city retains memory.
Alsina: relationship becomes structure.
Colita: the body records history.
Wagensberg : interaction produces understanding.
Evru is the closest artistic relative to the glyphic entity; Permanyer and Colita illuminate Barcelona as a living archive; Alsina connects symbol and architectural geometry; Wagensberg connects observation, complexity and transformation.
About he image:
The diagram on top of this post presents Barcelona through five complementary witnesses arranged around a central Chimera emblem. Evru/Zush represents symbolic invention: signs generate an autonomous world. Lluís Permanyer embodies urban memory, reading streets, façades, and vanished details as historical layers. Claudi Alsina translates mathematical relations into architectural structure. Colita records Barcelona through bodies, gestures, social conflict, and photographic testimony. Jorge Wagensberg contributes complexity, emergence, observation, and interactive understanding. The radial composition shows that none of these viewpoints contains the city alone. Together they form a comparative constellation linking symbol, memory, geometry, embodiment, and systems thinking within the broader CGS project, without collapsing distinctions.
Where do you look next—and what changed because you looked again?
English edition: Vyaas, Shaharee. The Chimera Protocols of Transmutation. 254 pages, standard color. Independently Published, September 15, 2026. ISBN 9798255835324. Price: €29.99.
Edición española: Vyaas, Shaharee. Los protocolos quiméricos de transmutación y El libro de la tinta dividida. 254 páginas, color estándar. Publicación: 15 de septiembre de 2026. ISBN 978-84-09-88086-7. Precio: €29,99.
