Demolished Monument is a proposal for “restoring” the demolition of the monument to General Prim in Barcelona’s Parc de la Ciutadella.

Nonument, MACBA, Barcelona, 2014
Curators: Josep Bohigas & Bartomeu Marí.
A production of MACBA, Barcelona.

Model and digital print.

Edition of 3

In 1871 the people of Paris rose up in arms and established the Commune on the basis of anarchist and socialist principles. On 16 May, the revolutionary government tore down the Vendôme column. The column, erected on the orders of Napoleon to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, was considered by the Commune as «a monument of barbarism, an affirmation of militarism, a permanent insult to the defeated and an attack on fraternity».

After the Commune had been brought down by the French army, the Government, under the presidency of General Mac Mahon, had the column rebuilt.

In 1882 Barcelona’s authorities decided to erect a monument to General Prim, soldier and politician, who wad been responsible for bombing the city and crushing of the «Jamància» popular uprising of 1843, as well as the brutal repression of African slaves in 1848 when he was Capitan-general of Puerto Rico.

On 20 December 1936, in the first few months of the Spanish Civil War and in the middle of the revolutionary process, the Joventuts Llibertàries, (anarchist youth movement) demolished the monument.

In 1948 Franco’s municipal authorities decided to rebuild the monument and commissioned sculptor Frederic Marès to produce a copy of the original sculpture.

Political iconoclasm as a form of expropriation of the symbolic heritage of the oligarchy and the construction of the public space.

Model maker:
Oriol Poch

photo labels:
Pérez de Rozas, 1936. Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
Josep Brangulí, 1936. Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya

Project for the Web, 2014

In the framework of the cycle “Outdoors. Three contemporary narratives of fragility: Isabel Banal, Domènec and Toni Giró” curated by Jordi Font.
Container. IGAC

The project consists of an intervening cartography of Occupied Palestinian Territories from Google Maps (1). The hundreds of images of fragments of territory (200 meters away from the ground) have been captured on the computer screen and recomposed as a puzzle to build an immense aerial image. A material obtained with a technology of military origin (photography by satellite and geolocation) initially restricted, which is now accessible to everyone on the web. But all this over-information, all this alleged “hypervisibility” hides, in fact, the logic of Israeli occupation. The intervention on the map, in a kind of reverse cartography, is to manually erase all Palestinian traces and leave only visible the web of settlements, military bases (2) and exclusive routes for Israelis that cross the whole territory and make imposible its normal functioning as a country. In the act of being erased, the Palestinians become visible as “naked life” in a void space of law, in a state of permanent exception.

1 / The documents leaked by Edward Snowden have revealed that Google Maps is part of the global surveillance network operated by several Western intelligence agencies.
2 / Some of the military installations do not appear in Google Maps images, as they are deliberately deleted or camouflaged for “security reasons.”