2018

Two light box, 66 x 50 cm each.
Edition of 3

Image “Welcome to Barcelona”: Pavilion of the Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas installed in the Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona, 1888.

Image “Welcome to Madrid”: Filipino “village” built for the General Exhibition of the Philippine Islands in the Retiro Park in Madrid and populated by indigenous people of different ethnicities and different animal species from the archipelago, 1887.

Welcome to Barcelona (2018) and Welcome to Madrid (2018) is welcoming to two cities in Spain, after two major expositions on the Philippines presented at the end of the 19th century. In 1887 the General Exposition of the Philippine Islands, promoted by the Overseas Ministry, took place in the Retiro Park in Madrid. In the general catalog the project was introduced explaining “Spain did not yet know what in foreign lands was the subject of study and praise”, despite being the metropolis after more than three hundred years of colonial rule. And he continued “The productions of that fertile soil, the works that reveal the privileged aptitude of their children for the arts all, the results of the influence of the metropolis in a colony never selfishly exploited, were known to us by references or fragmentary way.” (*) Good wishes were accompanied by a desire to show the strength of the domination of the archipelago, in a voracious propaganda attempt, just a decade before finally losing the colony. A year later, at the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona in 1888, the Pavilion of the General Company of Tobacco from the Philippines was presented, a company that represented one of the largest commercial interests overseas, founded by Marquis of Comillas, slave trader, businessman and shipping magnate.

This project reflects on the structural violence implicit in the political and economic strategies around colonialism, and on the phenomenon of universal expositions as a kind of vain cartographies conceived from the metropolis to exhibit countries and dominated cultures, as cabinets of curiosities and catalog of exoticism that did nothing but increase geographical and cultural distance. Under the pretext of scientific and anthropological interest, the positivist and suprematist gaze articulated around moral, racist, and economic interests was imposed. National stereotypes, images of power, institutional criticism or the euphemisms of progress are raised here through the displacement of the subject of contemplation: they are not images of the two host cities that welcome us, but are images of the vision that those two cities offered from the Philippines in the context of two great celebratory events.

Teresa Grandas
(Fragment of the text of the catalog of the exhibition Domènec. Not Here, Not Anywhere. Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila, 2019)

(*) Catalog of the General Exhibition of the Philippine Islands, Madrid, 1887.

* The 1/3 edition belongs to the collection of the Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila.