published in Perro Berde (Manila, Philippines, 2019).

On February 2019, the Ateneo Art Gallery hosts Domènec’s exhibit titled Not Here, Not Anywhere, organized in collaboration with Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and with assistance from the Embassy of Spain in the Philippines. The exhibit features selected works from the MACBA show as well as two new works Domènec created after a 10-day visit to Manila and as a response to the Philippine context. He is also one of the featured speakers at the 2019 Art Fair Philippines art talks. The following Q & A explores the artist’s background as well as his insights on the role of artists in revisiting the past, reassessing history, and recovering the voice of the voiceless.

ATENEO ART GALLERY:
For the benefit of Philippine readers, can you give us an overview of your beginnings or early years as an artist?

DOMÈNEC:
My years of learning coincide with the last years of the 80s; my first relevant exhibition is from 1989.

In 1975, the dictator dies after 40 years in power and a period of transition begins, to a democracy full of conflicts and tensions between the oligarchic and conservative structures that seek, and in part achieve, holding on to power, and the desire among the general population, women, workers, students … to initiate a deep and radical change. This period of political turmoil, which I experience intensely as a high school student, we could say—and simplifying a bit—ends in 1982 when the Socialist Party wins the elections by an absolute majority. For the first time since 1939, Spain is governed by a president not involved with the fascist dictatorship. It was the beginning of a period of euphoria resulting from an act of collective forgetfulness, when no one will be judged for the crimes of the dictatorship (there are still tens of thousands of unidentified corpses in mass graves scattered throughout the country).

In the context of art, this period of euphoria, amnesia, and superficiality coincides with the period of a speculative bubble of the art market. Universities and schools also participate, in a certain way, in this process, producing an interruption in the transmission of knowledge between our generation and the generation of Spanish artists of the 70s, much more involved in artistic practices committed to experimentation, social criticism, or political commitment.

We could say that it was at the end of the 80s and in the first half of the 90s when some young artists began to configure other ways of working beyond the parameters established by public institutions and the art market of the time, starting, among other things, to reconstruct the relationship with the local tradition of conceptual and political art. For example, the work of artists, such as Francesc Abad[1] (1944), who were absolutely invisible during the 80s, becomes fundamental in reintroducing the recovery of the memory of the victims of the dictatorship in the 90s with their project El Camp de la Bota.

AAG:
What were the circumstances that led to your current art practice? Or what led you to focus on modernity and architecture and urban planning as points of interest and criticism?

D:
I have always been very interested in architecture, as well as in contemporary history and political theory, but it was more than twenty years ago, in the middle of the 90s, in a historical moment characterized by the triumph of global capitalism and the apparent defeat of all the attempts to build alternative scenarios, that I started through my artistic practice to ask myself about the role of the artist in society and about myself as a contemporary subject.

Of the artistic practices, architecture is the one that, in a more radical and sometimes even traumatic way, affects the daily life of people and at the same time is intersected by all the conflicts and political contradictions. This makes it an ideal territory to analyze how the different processes of modernity materialize, even where different “modernities” collide.

The intimate, complex, dangerous, and often contradictory relationship established by architecture with ideology and social utopias on the one hand, and with oligarchic power, the market, and speculation on the other, constitute a perfect field to deploy contemporary artistic practice as a process of analysis and criticism.

Precisely when the housing utopias derived from the Athens Charter[1] (1933) are completely shipwrecked in the metropolitan peripheries of the whole world, it is more pertinent to replant the question of how to live together.

AAG:
How does an art project begin for you? What interests you in pursuing further research on a specific topic or historical event or period?

D:

This depends on many variables, but we could say that there are two types of projects. Self-generated projects, that is, projects that are the result of the general process of my research and interests, and projects generated from a context, whether social, geographic, political, or specific. For example, a project on Soviet utopian architecture like Conversation Piece: Narkomfin would be an example of the first typology. I have never been to Moscow and therefore the project does not respond to a reaction to a specific context, but to a process of a more general reflection on the limits of the modern project.

On the other hand, the long series of projects on the context of Israel and Palestine (Real Estate, 48_Nakba, Erased Land, or Baladia Future City) are the direct result of an intense relationship with a specific geographical context initiated by an invitation from Nirith Nelson, an Israeli curator, to work in that place. Many of my projects start this way, from an invitation to stay in a new context. From this trigger, I begin a more or less long process of immersion and investigation of this context. I apply what I call a “bastard” research process that works at many levels, from the physical experience of the place, the route, observation and listening, to conversation with all kinds of people and agents—from the food vendor in the street to the political activist, from the taxi driver or the refugee to the journalist or the academic—or to the consultation of historical archives or specialized readings. Finally the resulting project is a kind of “response” to the place.

AAG:
It has been noted (in the catalogue essay) that you view architecture as a “political unconscious“. Can you expound on this?

D:
There is a phrase that says “no building is innocent”, which perfectly defines this concept. A formalistic and academic analysis of architecture would center its interest on the formal and aesthetic qualities of buildings, as if they were abstract bodies, but no building is innocent. Its “unconscious” is loaded with political conflicts, hidden human dramas, life stories of the workers who built it, of those who inhabited them … this “unconscious” is what interests me and what I try to rescue in my projects, like, for example, in the project Rakenjan Käsi (The Workers Hand) that I made in Helsinki. Instead of focusing my research on the building Kulttuuritalo (The House of Culture, 1952), designed by Alvar Aalto, all my interest was focused on recovering the voice and memory of the volunteer workers who gave generously and free of charge more than 500,000 hours of their lives to the realization of the project. My project raises the question of why the fundamental contribution of these volunteers has been forgotten by official accounts.

AAG:
How do you see your role today as an artist in relation to the “conversations” with icons of architecture and/or modernist projects you have embarked on?

D:
I have worked around the architectural paradigms of modernity, with a critical reading of symbolic constructions by Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, or Le Corbusier in an attempt to identify architecture as the “political unconscious” of modernity. As Walter Benjamin already detected, the architects’ projects would constitute the best incarnation of all those dreams of an impotent modernity to fulfill its promises of emancipation and welfare for all. Ironically, contradictions between the ideological program and political reality become more evident in social housing projects.

I work with the concept of history established by Walter Benjamin, where reviewing history only makes sense if it is a political combat tool of the present. I am interested in studying what has happened to these projects to resituate them in the present, so that they can be discussed, provide complexity, layers of meaning, so that together we can imagine and reimagine alternatives.

AAG:
Your research visit to Manila last July 2018 was quite brief, but you were able to explore and develop a new project. Were there any new insights you gained about the Philippines or Manila during this 10-day visit? Can you tell us more about the new project you are working on for the Ateneo Art Gallery exhibition?

D:
Yes, my first visit to Manila and my first contact with the context of the Philippines was quite brief but intense. I must admit that my prior knowledge was very poor. The Filipino context seems really interesting and complex, with many layers of meanings that coexist in the same spatial-temporal context.

I am shocked by how ignorant we, the inhabitants of Spain, are about our colonial past, its consequences and the responsibilities that derive from it. Despite the fact that the last decolonization process of North African territories took place in the 70s, there has not yet been an important debate in public opinion. Only recently have we begun to review and question some of the important figures of the last colonial period in America (Cuba and Puerto Rico) and Asia (Philippines), such as Antonio López y López, the Marquis of Comillas, a businessman with very good relations with political power and the monarchy, the founder—of among other large companies—of the General Company of Tobaccos of the Philippines, who began his fortune by dedicating himself to the slave trade in Cuba. For example, the great fortunes of the Barcelona bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century and the industrial wealth of Catalonia are based on slavery and the exploitation of the natural resources of the colonized territories.

In my work, I have been interested in how, beyond the territorial occupation and the plundering of natural wealth and bodies, the colonizer also “colonizes” the cultural images of the colonized, appropriating their referents, acculturizing the population, and building an exoticizing story, where the colonized is presented as a “savage” who needs the “civilizing” intervention of the colonizer through his educational, ideological, and military apparatus.

Text for the publication Domènec. A century of European Architecture, edited by MAC – Mataró Art Contemporani in the context of Manifesta 15. Barcelona Metropolitana.  December 2024

One form of concentration camp can be a hotel, at the price of fifty pounds sterling per night, in a shared room. This is how Marco Martins documents it in the film Great Yarmouth. Provisional Figures (2022). In Norfolk County, the friendly coastal town that was once recognized as a tourist enclave, ended up becoming the destination of a large migrant population, confined without documentation in ramshackle hotels and enslaved in turkey meat processing factories. The example is only somewhat arbitrary for a quantitative matter. Just as Domènec’s proposal “A Century of European Architecture” contains up to twenty-two examples of literal concentration camps scattered throughout the continental geography along the twentieth century, on the streaming platform Filmin, the search “concentration camps” offers, to date, 45 titles found. These different signs of numerical order harbour the same eloquence with multiple derivatives: neither the concentration camp is exceptional – we will have to return to this – nor does the exhibition of its intricacies repel us. Everything suggests, in some way, that the concentration camp obeys a certain inevitability or, in other words, arises as a structural effect of certain causes that, far from being few and far between, remain embedded in the anthropological and political paradigm of modernity. From this perspective, any quantitative approach to the notion of camp, beyond its condition as an archive of real injustices, contains enough data to challenge the nonsense that inhabits the interior of any notion of ideal justice.

Ideals, whatever they may be, do not belong to this world, but operate as slogans to correct it according to a certain value regime. Hence, even what is just, like any principle on which a social utopia is organized, entails a division. A regulated world is a world divided between what fits value and what remains on the outside. If the camp is so numerous, so variable and so geographically extended, it is because it refers to this vast outside that is always there, despised and made available for exploitation or abandonment. It could be said that the hotel – concentration camp – that Tania governs in Great Yarmouth does not respect this argument since, of course, it is illegal and, consequently, no matter how much the locals act as accomplices, the existence of this camp does not obey the law (it should be remembered that even Auschwitz was protected by decree). The migrants who come to the place, in principle, would not be properly excluded from the value regime, but relegated to such a peripheral condition within the regime itself – provisional figures – that at any moment they can be pushed out. But a minimally attentive look makes it clear that division prevails and, with it, there is always a remainder. In Great Yarmouth, in fact, there is another camp, atrocious and bloodthirsty, in which hundreds of turkeys are slaughtered daily by the unfortunate sons of Saul[1].

There is no concentration camp without division and the most elementary caesura is the one that, within the living being, distinguishes an animal condition and a possible rational condition. Hence, within the framework of humanism, there is room for the slaughterhouse without any remorse. But it would be too easy to interpret the existence of the camps as the result of the simple animalization of certain human individuals. There is no doubt that a camp is a technical device whose function is to accelerate the process of dehumanization of inmates, but its condition of possibility lies in very deep legal and ideological artifices. Roberto Esposito has reconstructed in detail how archaic Roman law formulates the categorical distinction between the “natural man” – for whom it may or may not be appropriate to enjoy a personal status – and the entity “person” itself, that which in the body is more than the body and which is the basis of its brain, social and civic dimension. The purpose of this division is none other than to allow the preparation of a sophisticated catalogue of gradation of the person device. Those who have overcome their dimension as natural men to favour the full deployment of their rational potentialities will become integral persons; at the other end, those individuals who remain anchored in their primitive “naturalness” must be considered defective persons. Between the two extremes, the panoply of possibilities can be as extensive as one intends (semi-person – provisional figure –, non-person – animal –, anti-person – mad person –…). The final horizon of this argument is the clarification of the applicability of the lawful rights. The complete person is the unequivocal subject with full rights while, in its gradual downward decline, that same subject is progressively dispossessed of privileges until he ends up confined to the concentration camp: the place where the definitive suspension of the rights takes place. Of course, the key point of this reasoning lies in the arbitrariness that affects the recognition of the threshold that separates integral person from defective person. The defect that makes any individual or community eligible to enlarge the population of a camp may consist in the most diverse anomaly: recognizing him as an enemy, as a Jew, as an impious or as an animal. What holds the power to discern this terrible border is, quite simply, the power.

As Giorgio Agamben has argued, power, based on that caesura that is now expressed by the terms zoe (the mere metabolic life common to all living beings) and bios (life endowed with a complement of language and politics), must be understood as a kind of judgment by which it is determined which lives are qualified to form a body of citizenship and which, on the contrary, remain in a precarious state that makes them despicable and exterminable. This expendable remnant of life – naked life – is, consequently, a production of power itself to the same extent that it also produces citizens with full rights. The two poles derived from the caesura are direct effects of sovereign power since this is always biopolitics, a mandate over life that can only command and correct it through its division. It does not matter whether this biopolitics is resolved by the orthodox way – letting people live and making people die – or by becoming its necropolitical variant – making people live and letting people die. Power, insofar as it aspires to exercise domination, is nothing more than the delimitation, on the appropriate scale, of a domus – a house, a space regulated and governed by a dominus, a head of the family, owner and master – whose function is to offer shelter to those who deserve to be inside and to keep outside those who endanger the rule. The historical failure in the application of Human Rights is not due to the lack of forcefulness in the defence of the category of person but, on the contrary, to the very ideology of the person by which they are condemned to a division that classifies and hierarchizes them. The concentration camp, in this key, is the negative of the space of the domus produced by the same logic that builds it. The camp is the shed attached to the domus where bare, naked life is confined – as is literally stated in The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer; 2023) – which is no longer so much an object of domination – it has been expelled from the house and hence lacks the principle of law that organises it – as of extraction or annihilation.

The production of naked life is functional. What is confined to the camp, susceptible to exploitation, enslavement, discard, or extermination, fulfils a certain role as the foundation of the power that governs the house. In its most elementary profile, this shed is the mere warehouse where the life dispossessed of rights is stored as a food supply or as the free workforce that sustains the well-being of the domus; in turn, in the most sophisticated version, the camp has the immunity function of identifying and confining the dangers that lurk in the established domain. Power is power to the extent that it is in danger of being lost. To hold power is to be threatened by some risk. Every community, established and mobilized from a principle of identity of any order (racial, theological, ideological…), at the same time that it is constituted as a family in which individual barriers are suspended, demands to be immunized against those differences that pose a risk to its supposed idiosyncrasy. In this situation, the camp is one of the consequences of the preventive neutralization of the danger exercised by any state of law, legitimized to enact states of exception that allow the repeal of law and the reduction to naked life of those who pose a threat. Any regime of power, therefore, harbours the outline of a camp, including the model of liberal democracies. If today the camps camouflaged in all kinds of variants are proliferating, it is because of the progressive conversion of the rule of law – the one that in principle would have the purpose of dispelling fear and establishing social tranquillity – into Security State – the one that is based on the promotion of enemies and fear to strengthen its rules of domination. The greater the promotion of dangers, the greater the definition of situations as exceptional and risky for the communal domus, then the greater the legitimacy of power to suggest the identification of actors and, above all, the greater the basis for suspending their full condition. With these ingredients in place, the proliferation of camps is inevitable, whether they are as ordinary and explicit as Guantánamo, or disguised under the precautionary rhetoric as in Lesbos or any Foreigner Detention Centre. Referring to the concentration camps that populated the European geography throughout the twentieth century is therefore not a mere exercise in historical memory but archaeology of the present.

[1] Saul fia (Son of Saul). Dir.: László Nemes. 2015. Under the cover of the biblical story, the protagonist, a member of the Sonderkommander, works in the ovens where fellow human beings are annihilated. In a sort of loop, Tania, a Portuguese and first-generation immigrant to Norfolk, does the same when she confines her compatriots between the hotel and the slaughterhouse.

Text for the book  The Stadium, the Pavilion and the Palace. Domènec, An Intervention at the Barcelona Pavilion, edited by Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2023.

By and large, when Domènec’s work is being discussed, it is interpreted as a reflection on the failure of the avant-garde – in particular of the architectural avant-garde – which is deemed to have succumbed under the weight of its own utopian tenets. This widely held view stems from a supposition that is generally not disputed, namely, the good faith of the avant-garde. Its vast plans for the emancipation of humankind were, it is believed, thwarted by a kind of insuperable gap between the ambition of its projects and the miserable reality of a world ill-equipped to make use of them, less still to understand them. The history of the rise and fall of the Modern Movement – written by its own leading lights, in which the rise is presented as a legend of heroic feats and the fall, all too evident to be denied, as frozen in an endless wait, in an eternal cogito interruptus in which there is always room for ‘second vanguards’, ‘third vanguards’ and so on – ends up turning its architects into colonists or noble savages of a sort, no less ingenuous than those who, though they never succeeded in learning why the whole world was against them, found in their nobility the cause of their demise – in general, a slow death full of melancholy – and their architecture a necklace of gemstones whose gleam does not redeem, as was hoped, but does console, at least the few permitted to enter the private gardens of this ‘modern architecture’. In short, that the architectural avant-gardes – the classic avant-garde, the seconds and the thirds, etc. – have been the victim of the incomprehension of society, history and the world.

However, one only has to look with even a passing glance at Domènec’s works to see immediately that, whereas many of those who comment on his art adhere to that interpretation of history as legend, he himself does not. Belief in the good faith of the avant-garde, in the ingenuousness of architects, always seen as unheeded prophets crying out in the desert, in the necessarily endogamous persistence of a ‘victimised architecture’, does not by any means figure among his intentions. The Modern Movement works he has chosen in order to develop his projects have profoundly telling profiles: buildings intended to provide a solution to the ‘housing problem’, such as the Narkomfin Building (Fig. 01) and the Casa Bloc (Fig. 02); buildings that went on to become metaphors of the regeneration of society through the literal healing of its sick individuals, as occurred in the Paimio and Barcelona tuberculosis sanatoriums (Fig. 03); buildings shown off at the start of the Cold War, when the borders of the blocs were not yet fully drawn, as the result of some newly achieved collective work, as exemplified by the Caisa cultural centre in Kallio (Fig. 04-05); and monuments – to the Third International, to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (Fig. 06) – of a new era marching ever forwards – this was the era of movements, the Modern Movement among them – which, however, not only has its martyrs but also its architecture, in other words, as always, its heaviest burdens – mummies and pyramids.

In this essay, I will not go into the specific complexity of each one of these projects of Domènec’s, which is much greater than might be deduced from a mere inventory of them – in which I have not even respected their chronology – but I do wish to point out that the way he himself draws connections between them should in itself make us think of an ‘other’ history, or better still, of an other ‘present’.

At times, this relationship develops in the form of a circle that is closing, as when Domènec proposes to us an earthly use of works whose brightness could only come from above, could only be produced in the heavens – heavens dotted, of course, with stars of steel. The fact that a monument – the one dedicated to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht – should transform into an example of existenzminimum (Fig. 08) means that the endpoints of his interest touch: the solemn block of bricks of the monument is stripped of its symbols, resized and hollowed out to become a small abode that already points to other blocks of minimal housing – the Narkomfin Building and the Casa Bloc (Fig. 01-02) – that would come ‘later’. I say ‘later’ because I have no doubt that Domènec interpreted the occupation of the monument as a form of resistance to the ‘scientific resolution’ of human habitation. What the latter proposes is that the residents should come to their homes in order to learn how to inhabit, to be shaped by the rules that their homes impose on them as bit players in an abstract, objective abode that is always new yet always the same – that is, nothing more and nothing less than the way in which utopia is consumed (literally in the form of a will-o’-the-wisp) in the market – whereas the former, in contrast, extolling its position as a refuge, its state without statehood, which is perfectly circumstantial and fleeting, talks about the human capacity to triumph over any monument – meaning any imposition, the phantasmagorical presence of mummies and the crushing weight of pyramids – and to become ‘self-made’, without the need for prophets or for avant-gardists, for that matter. This minimised monument brings to mind those minor characters, always dressed in rags and tatters, who prowl about the Roman ruins in prints by Piranesi: they are not there, as is often remarked, to draw attention by their smallness to the impressive scale of the ancient monuments, but instead to demonstrate the fragility of these self-same monuments, defeated by the tiny root of the blade of grass lodged in their cracks and all the while attacked and conquered by bodies of flesh and blood, striving and suffering – free – who make room for themselves in them.

And in other instances, this relationship is developed in the form of a ‘dialectical montage’, as when we discover the parallelisms – but parallelisms that extol the contrasts, parallels that grate – that occur between those canonical examples of the avant-gardes that I have just referred to, and ‘other’ cases, undoubtedly similar, analogous, that Domènec has used in his projects. The clearest example is the Les Minguettes housing estate (Fig. 09-10), built in the 1960s on the outskirts of Lyon, which is directly related to its predecessors in the 1920s and thirties – the Narkomfin Building and Casa Bloc – which I will discuss below. Before that, however, I want to make mention of projects Domènec has developed in relation to Palestine (Fig. 11-13) and which, in a more patent and, undoubtedly, more terrible way demonstrate the violence intrinsically contained in the discipline of urbanism and the reality of architecture as the ‘face of power’. The reforming aspirations of the avant-garde architecture chosen by Domènec, which proclaimed itself constructed on the tabula rasa of a ‘new’ society shaped by that self same architecture, are painfully reflected in the destruction of Palestinian villages in territories occupied by Israel, which consisted not only of razing the houses and expelling their inhabitants but of erasing their names, turning into a sinister reality – or hyperreality – that concept so beloved of avant-garde architecture and urbanism: nettoyage. Le Corbusier, for example, wrote that Adolf Loos, the author of Ornament and Crime, ‘swept right beneath our feet, and it was a Homeric cleansing [nettoyage] […] In this Loos has had a decisive influence on the destiny of architecture’. What might the urbanism and architecture that emerge from that terrifying nettoyage of those Palestinian villages be like – from a cleansing that truly was Homeric, truly corresponding to a ‘new spirit’ – if not irremediably modern? A tabula rasa for a tabula rasa’s sake, some might think. And indeed someone has concluded that the confrontation that Domènec’s work proposes between these seemingly extreme cases and others that are classic, admired by all, takes for granted that the former are a degeneration of the latter, a corruption thereof. In contrast with the tabula rasa that results from demolishing Palestinian villages (Fig. 14) right down to the bottom of their foundations, of wiping their places and their names from the 11 maps negative and ghostly topography and place names – the tabula rasa of the classic vanguards would be nothing more than a metaphor, a beautiful one if we think of it in terms of utopia, a moving one if we do so in terms of failure – utopia or failure, the line-up of heroes always wins.

However, the rapprochement that occurs in Domènec’s work between the immaculate model and its perversion does not allow for any thought of opposites. Rather, what it tells us is that the perversion was already contained in the model. In other words, the model was itself perverse. And how! In his report on the Baladia Ciudad Futura (Baladia Future City) project (Fig. 15-17), Domènec refers to an interview that the architect Eyal Weizman did with Avi Kochavi, at that time commander and instructor of the Israeli Paratrooper Brigade, who led military operations such as those undertaken in the Kasbah (old city) of Nabus or in the Balata refugee camp, and also an architect. During the interview, according to Domènec, Weizman ‘noted with surprise that the theoretical positions adopted by the Israeli army to develop new military urban warfare techniques were based repeatedly on writings by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the Situationists, among others, and he wondered about the use of these critical theories as “tools” in the hands of military thinkers.’ Surprise? To allay any surprise, one only has to begin to ask oneself of what exactly are the avant-garde the vanguard, bearing in mind that they have always exalted the tabula rasa, their lavish use of the prefixes of dispossession, de, des, etc., setting them up as linguistic pillars of their ideological projects, and the fanatical obsession with which they retroactively reconstructed history, turning it into a land of treasure waiting to be looted. Might not the confusion between art and life constantly upheld by the avant-gardes – who termed it ‘synthesis’ – attain its culmination in its ‘military’ use, for that is, after all, where the term ‘vanguard’ comes from, as we all know? The vanguard would, in keeping with this argument, be the continuation of ‘life’ by other means, though it should be said that those means are those of death. In the face of such a ‘surprise’, I cannot help but think – and this is just one of many examples – of what Martin Damus said when analysing the happenings of the 1970s, which was that if the first condition of the happening lies in subjecting participants to the rules of the game established by the artist, there will be some instances in which the participant would be unable to free themselves of those rules even if they withdrew, for example when the ‘event’ involved abandoning the disorientated participants in the middle of the night in the heart of a forest. In May ’68, Damus recalls, the Berlin police employed this game ‘seriously’ to terrorise – still more, if such a thing were possible – the people they had detained.

However, I said earlier that I would refer, albeit briefly, to Domènec’s project on Les Minguettes (Fig. 09-10). What emerges from what Domènec presents us with is not very different to what I have just remarked, though seen now from the opposite point of view. Let me explain. Les Minguettes is a grand ensemble built in the 1960s on the outskirts of Lyon to provide housing for the immigrant population arriving from France’s former colonies – housing for ‘cannon fodder’ in huge residential tower blocks with minimal services and amenities. The history of Les Minguettes runs parallel to that of other housing estates of this type in France and elsewhere around the world: turned in short order into symbols of marginalisation, social breakdown, crime and urban violence, they were later demolished in whole or in part, events that became huge shows broadcast live that constituted a kind of auto-da-fé by a histrionically contrite and penitent – in other words, and as always, hypocritical – modernity. However, the history that Domènec records in his work is subtly different: it turns out that the ‘instability’ of Les Minguettes – though we could also extend this to other cases – stems from the social movements that developed there from the 1980s onwards, centred above all on combating and denouncing racism, the main source of which is the institutional organisation itself of society. So, the ‘return to order’ has, as always, taken place over two phases, the first serving as justification of the second: firstly, the stigmatisation of protest; and secondly, the blowing-up of its material world, its humous, thereby making it clear to the millions of viewers who saw how those blocks collapsed instantly in a vast cloud of dust at the press of a button exactly who has the monopoly on destruction.

In the histories of architecture and of urbanism, and we are reminded of this by Domènec as well, the demolitions of these estates have been interpreted as the symbol of the failure of those utopias of the Modern Movement that I have already mentioned, etc., etc., so I will not be returning to that. I remarked earlier that Domènec offers us a different point of view, because here, in truth, what fails? If there are two fundamental books in the history of modern architecture and modern urbanism, they are those that Le Corbusier published in the 1920s, Vers une architecture and Urbanisme. In the second, after a tribute to Louis XIV, whom he describes as a ‘great urbanist’, Le Corbusier concludes by declaring ‘one does not revolutionise by revolutionising; one revolutionises by solving’; in the first, more clearly still, after setting forth the dilemma between ‘architecture or revolution’, he proclaims ‘revolution can be avoided’, attributing to architecture soothing powers which, ultimately, would not only end up equating architecture and life – through the subsuming of life in architecture: the human being as an intermediate point on the chain of evolution stretching from the monkey to architecture, as Georges Bataille put it – but also equating the architect with the great manager that modernity needs and demands. Watching the residential tower blocks on estates, the grands ensembles, being blown up, one might say, however, that no, revolution cannot be avoided or at least – let us not be so optimistic – that architecture cannot accomplish everything, that it does not temper, that it does not mitigate. So what kind of failure are we talking about? Who or what, precisely, is failing? A noble utopia? Or a ‘plan’? I have just been referring to Le Corbusier, but I would like to move on to Mies. At the time when his buildings were being constructed on the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, Le Corbusier wrote to him – confidentially – in a letter saying that he was proud that the two of them were being accused of being poets by functionalist architects, by architects of the machine. ‘They have told me countless times over the last two years: “Beware, you are a lyric poet, you are delirious”’, Le Corbusier wrote in 1927. Who said such a thing to him? Or, rather, how, based on such an utterly chimerical accusation, is the history of the rise and fall of modern architecture constructed? Lyricism and delirium: these are the extremes of the ‘plan’ of ‘architecture as victim’.

Domènec’s entire body of work reveals to us the strategies of capitalism through avant-garde architecture and urbanism, including in those places where few have delved. What should we say, for example, about his work on the cultural centre in Kallio, built by volunteers who, as he himself points out, ‘gave over 500,000 hours of their lives’ to construct it, but all that is remembered is the name of its architect, as if he were a new Zeus from whose head Athena, his work, was born, completely finished? Here it is no longer a matter just of failure but of fraud. ‘The names of kings appear in books’, but who actually built ‘Thebes of the Seven Gates’? Slaves, as we already know. What we perhaps do not know or have paid no attention to or do not want to think about is that many modern works were also constructed by slaves (Fig. 04-05): Domènec reminds us of this here and there, in the most unexpected place, in the architecture most loved by the lovers of ‘form’, for example, in the panopticon.

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If, as I have just said, Domènec’s work in general puts us on guard against the liberation utopias of the avant-garde and against the responsibilities of urbanism and architecture in modern terrors, his intervention in the German Pavilion goes further along the same lines. This intervention consisted of two changes: the Barcelona Chair – in reality a throne – was replaced by a pair of tubular Steel and Formica chairs; and the black carpet and red drapes were substituted by clothes pegged up on lines (Fig. 18). Domènec thus evoked the laundry hanging out to dry that always appears in photographs of the shacks that for decades filled the areas of Montjuïc left free by the 1929 International Exhibition after it closed – and even before it – and of the buildings left standing used by the authorities – papal, uniformed or civilian – as ‘temporary housing’ – perpetually temporary – for immigrants and all kinds of outcasts, though in fact they functioned as veritable prisons from which those detained, without any guarantees or time limit and in accordance with the total arbitrariness of the authorities, were ‘returned’ to their places of origin or wherever – the Palau de les Missions, for example, living up to its name (palace of the Catholic religious missions), was turned into a sinister ‘indigents classification centre’ – or as enclosed complexes for ‘relocating the thousands ousted from other neighbourhoods or shanties in the city when these were finally ‘urbanised’ – in other words, handed over to the market – as was the case of the Belgian Pavilion and the Olympic Stadium. The title of Domènec’s intervention echoes an article written by the great Josep Maria Huertas Claveria published in Destino magazine in 1966, ‘L’estadi, el Pavelló i el Palau’ (The Stadium, the Pavilion and the Palace), a vivid condemnation of the situation we are discussing. Reproduced as a facsimile by Domènec in the publication in newspaper format and on newsprint made available free of charge to visitors, the article was illustrated by just two photographs. The caption of one read, ‘The stadium outside: cracks’, while the other photograph was captioned ‘The stadium inside: laundry hanging up’ (Fig. 19). This would say everything there is to be said, and the laundry hung out by Domènec in an ‘other’ pavilion, reconstructed without time or history, gleaming with its new stones and marbles, inside and out, and, in short, triumphant – the ‘new and triumphant pavilion’, in effect – would have to reveal to us metonymically everything left below ground and which here too, in our own land, like the topographies and toponyms of those Palestinian villages, has been wiped from the map: the ‘unclassified’ bodies of flesh and blood, of the outcasts who built Thebes – and who fitted in these shirts and lay on these sheets that we still see in the photographs. Or it should make us think of the fact that ‘indigent classification centres’ continue to exist today.

Although, having said this, which is something Domènec makes perfectly clear in his publication and in his work, we are going to try and unearth other strata, ones more connected with the discipline of architecture. The laundry hanging out at the German pavilion – those garments of every kind and those sheets hanging vertically between the travertine, marble and onyx walls – bring to mind Gottfried Semper’s theories on the origins of architecture. This is no exaggeration, I assure you. On the one hand, Semper said that the first principle of any human culture is fabric (the knot, the garland, the border); and on the other, at the start of construction there is the wall, not seen as a support but as an enclosure. And what were those first walls, the ‘vertical enclosures that man invented […] making them with his hands’, but ‘the pen or sheepfold and the fence or hurdle obtained by interlacing and plaiting stakes and branches’? From this point, ‘the transition from the interlacing of branches to that of plant fibres […] and from there to the creation of fabric’ could not be more obvious to Semper and no less so to his two most faithful ‘modern’ followers, Adolf Loos and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, both of them sons of stonemasons and both of them keen, as no other Modern Movement architect was, on fine woods and marbles. Loos, in particular, summed up Semper’s theories in what he termed the ‘principle of cladding’: Loos says the first thing humankind discovered was – and note the supreme paradox here – cladding and, more particularly, textile cladding – ‘the covering is the oldest architectural detail’. Only later came the walls, which fixed the shape of spaces that fabrics, tapestries or drapes had previously defined. Modern architects, in contrast, work very differently or even precisely the other way round, according to Loos. First, they ‘imagine’ the spaces, then they enclose them with walls and lastly they choose the surfacing.

Mies never glossed in this way the theories of the ‘materialist’ Semper – who never forgot the barricades he helped to raise during the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849, recalling them as the perfect example of useful and hence beautiful walls – but seeing the photographs of the maquette of his glass skyscraper of 1922 (Fig. 20), could we not interpret its curves as the fall of a curtain – or of a ‘curtain wall’, to be scrupulously precise, thereby, at the same time, closing the circle that links Semper to the great themes of modern architecture? And when some years later, in 1927, Mies and Reich designed the Café Samt und Seide for the Women’s Fashion show in Berlin (Fig. 21), these silk and velvet drapes which, displaying their pleats and arranged in opposite flat and curving planes, enveloped – or rather, dressed – the spaces of the tables and chairs, what were they doing if not bringing out as indisputable evidence that ‘principle of cladding’ I have just referred to? Semper spoke of the transition from fabrics made of branches to those of plant fibres, and from there to the warp and weft of textiles: this is the point that Mies and Reich arrived at in the Café Samt und Seide. We find the next step in Villa Tugendhat, for example: the semi-circular plane is made – or once again, literally, hyperrealised – of ebony and the straight plane of onyx, fine, hard materials par excellence, in which the tactile properties of silk and velvet are replaced by the solely visual qualities of pulchritude (Fig. 22). It is not that there are no curtains in this house, but it is clear that walls have ‘arrived’, and what walls they are!

Even so, the work that best encapsulates and culminates this imaginary chain that extends from the plaiting of branches to the interlacing of plant fibres, to fabric and lastly the wall, that showcases a ‘cladding’ in its fullest sense, apparently, always anticipated, is the German Pavilion. Rugs and curtains, marbles, travertine and onyx, steel and glass reveal, in their simultaneity, a path that is nothing other than that of the loss and erasure of those hands that humankind used for the first time 8,000 years ago to weave. Cut hands. Somewhere, though I do not remember where now, Pasolini said that when the last artisan dies, the world will have ended. Many years before Pasolini’s death – at the hands of society – the German Pavilion had already put a full stop to this terrible story. It is true, the pavilion was only built to last just a few months, but it was enough to look closely at what Ángel González described as a ‘contraction of the body of Germany’ to glimpse, in its dark flashes, what was looming on the horizon.  How many saw it? When the pavilion was reconstructed years later, it was a matter, precisely, of not seeing, or rather, of forgetting.

To go back to Semper’s theories on cladding, what can we say about the shacks and, more specifically, about those that appear in the photographs in the publication Domènec issued as part of his intervention, copies of which were stacked on a pallet – in other words, on a base made of planks – so that visitors could help themselves? What we see are planks – precisely – and pieces of fabric, so we could say that due to some kind of historical inversion – which History has never taken into account – the ‘principle of cladding’ is the sole principle of the shack. Pieces of wood, fabric and clothes hanging out, of course, the last of these being the means through which the interior expresses itself, manifests itself, outside: in the sewing, in the scrap of fabric, in the repaired patch, in the knot, in the peg and in the face always imprinted on one of these sheets – in other words, in the wound. In bourgeois homes, or aspiring ones, clothes are hung out to dry hidden from view, relegated to small courtyards or rooftops, whereas in shacks they are in plain sight.

The clothing that Domènec hung out in the German Pavilion – all made by captive hands in some distant place in the East – triggers recollections without memory and deactivates other pieces of hanging fabric, like the flag of the United States in the collage with which Mies represented the interior of his project for the Convention Hall in Chicago in 1954: fabric which, rather than hanging, is ‘loaded’ (Fig. 23) – many would wrap themselves up in it. Many years earlier, in 1908, Loos had already ‘hung’ a glass American flag in front of a translucence alabaster wall on the façade of the Kärntner Bar in Vienna: the light shone through the flag and wall and filtered into the amber-coloured nooks and crannies of an immaculate conception (Fig. 24-25). And do the colours of the interior of the German Pavilion – the red of the curtain, the black of the rug, the yellow of the onyx – not represent, as is always said, quite cheerfully, the country’s flag, now perfectly petrified? There is no such thing as coincidence (Fig. 26).

‘I need to have a wall behind me’, Mies once said. He was referring, of course, to a wall as solid as a rock, that would not move; to a wall of fine marble – the epitome of idealism and the embodiment of eternity, according to classical tradition – or to a flag, equally rock-like, which, in addition to not moving – I am talking here of its essence – prevents anyone from doing so. Domènec makes it clear that, over and above the theories of cladding, the clothing hanging out is blowing in the wind not just to dry: all the while, it is throwing us off the scent, concealing, covering, tangling, spattering, fraying and disturbing.