Domènec. Unité Mobile (Roads Are Also Places). Martí Peran

When a hermeneutic aesthetics is obliged to intelligibly describe the premises according to which works of art have an essential raison d’être, but one that only manifests itself when those works are put into practice by interpretation, the most relevant example to draw on is the game. In effect, thanks to a long tradition of examining the impulse to play, this appears as a paradigm of the truth of aesthetic experience, that which occurs only and exclusively through the act of putting the works in play. There can be different rules and norms, instruments and player, but the game as such only comes into being in a here and now, through the action that sets this whole compendium of elements in motion. This reflection gives aesthetics the pretext it needs not to hold on to certain idealistic bases that have already entered into irreversible crisis and thus to continue to cling to the belief that art has an essence, which may be meagre and fleeting (only revealed in the instant of playing/ performing/ interpreting), but still effective for all that.

But the game is something more than a lovely trick for rescuing idealistic suppositions. Together with that almost desperate interpretation, the game can also be conceptualized as a direct product of homo ludens – in the line in which this was reworked by Huizinga and then taken up by the Situationists – and seen more as a way of consummating a real experience rather than as an (aesthetic) experience of truth. This may seem a very minor adjustment, but it is crucial. While hermeneutics seeks to maintain the idea of art as a means of access to a profound truth, the new game theory is solely committed to the value ofthe experience in real time, not oniy alien to a possible universe of categorical principles, but also free of any productive obligation. The game can thus be converted into an effective strategy, not for maintaining an antiquated epistemology, but for toppling it once and for all. After suitably amending its Surrealist antecedents (the game, like the dream, has always been a mirror in which to observe deep unconscious impulses), the Situationists played to create situations with this new perspective: convinced that only the freedom ofthe game permits the construction of an equally free subject, capable of accumulating real experiences instead of getting lost in the search for an ineffable meaning.

Unité Mobile (Roads Are Also Places) is, in the first instance, a toy; a remote-controlled truck that can be driven at one’s pleasure. It would be wrong to call it a sculpture, or even a mobile sculpture that, once set in motion, is reinstated as such. It is a toy – to continue with the dichotomy we have established here – that is not idealistic but Situationist. The clearest proof of this is, of course, the use of a model of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation as the truck’s container. The gesture is eloquent: the modern architectural paradigm for the happy dwelling, conceived as universal solution on the basis of excessively predetermined and utopian premises, has now been converted into a mere playful instrument, restless and absurd if it is not handled with freedom. The proposition expresses a dual intention: play as a paraphrase ofthe value of real experience, flexible and non-productive and, in addition, a game that subverts the illusory pretensions of modernity, taking the place of dreams by constructing a solid anchorage in the world – and the Unité is a paradigm in its forms of resolving, architectonically, this epistemological illusion of being in the world – with a mobile toy that is domestic, actually usable and vulnerable.

The video recording ofthe remote-controlled unit circulating freely in the corridors ofthe Unité d’Habitation in Marseille redoubles the intentions ofthe project. It is in the self-same static space designed as a universal container of habitation that a ludic mobility – the same ludic mobility that Constant expressed in “The Principle of Disorientation” – 1 is now imposed: a ludic mobility capable of managing its own trajectories, in much the same way as the inhabitants of the Unité ended up modifying the archetype by constantly adapting it to their needs.

Martí Peran
“Mira cómo se mueven”. Fundación Telefónica, Madrid 2005

1 “There will no longer be any centre to be reached, but instead an infinite number of moving centres. There will no longer be any chance of getting off track in the sense of getting lost, but rather in the more positive sense of finding previously unknown paths.” Constant, “The principle of disorientation” in X. Costa / L. Andreotti (eds), Situationists. Art, Politics, Urbanism, MACBA/ Actar, Barcelona, 1996, pp. 86-87.

Rieres/Rambles

Osservatorio Nomade/Barcelona (Domènec, Pau Faus, Giulia Fiocca, Pere Grimau, Paolo Nadalin, Elvira Pujol, Anna Recasens, Lorenzo Romito, Glòria Safont-Tria, Jordina Sangrà, Laia Solé, Joan Vila-Puig, Debora Zanette)
2007

Routes around the Barcelona
urban area

Rieres/Rambles is a territorial research project promoted by Stalker, and organised by the OSSERVATORIO NOMADE/BARCELONA. It is part of a series of similar projects undertaken previously, such as Campagna Romana (Rome, 2006) and Barilonga (Bari, 2006). The project aims to find incidences of new models for interpreting territory in the Greater Barcelona Area based on direct, collective and transdisciplinary experiences that have the practice of roaming as their basis. Two phases of work: «Roaming» and «Variable Distances and Multiple Identities».
«Roaming»: A three-day group walk (12th-14th April 2007) with five different departure points and five areas of simultaneous research: Sitges and the Garraf; Olesa de Montserrat and the Baix Llobregat; Viladecavalls and the Vallès Occidental; Llinars del Vallès and the Vallès Oriental; and Sant Andreu de Llavaneres and the Maresme.
«Variable Distances and Multiple Identities» (2007-2009): This involved the creation of workshops and working groups in order to carry out research into, reflect on and promote new models for interpreting territory in the Greater Barcelona Area.
The exploration of the Greater Barcelona Area on foot as the basis for territorial research, involves adopting a position outside the guidelines that construct the standardised experience of everyday life. By observing and listening to the erratic roaming line we have been able to experience a reality that eschews superficial categorisations and offers multiple possibilities for research far removed from media simplifications.

Superquadra casa-armário

Super-size block wardrobe-size house

Museu Nacional do Conjunto Cultural da Republica, Brasilia, Brazil. 2007

Two prototypes measuring 220 x 80 x 65 cm each.
Wood, blankets and plastic objects

A scaled down recreation of two buildings in the huge blocks of residential housing in Brasília, called “superquadras” or giant blocks of houses; designed by Lucio Costa. Made into prototypes of individual shelters for the “moradores da rua” or homeless.

Project made for the exhibition Moradias Transitórias. Novos Espaços da Contemporanidade.
Organised by: Nicola Goretti

48_Nakba

Israel/Palestine, 2007

DVD, 22’
Images, script and direction: Domènec and Sàgar Malé
Vtr editing: Kilian Estrada
Participants: Jaffar Istayeh, Marta Ramoneda, Jamil Sawalmeh, Refugees in Ramallah and the refugee camps of Al Fara’a and Balata
Acknowledgements: Farid Liftawi, Ze’ev Maor, Association of Refugees in Lifta
a documentary film by MAPASONOR
Mapasonor ACD 2007

Five interviews to different Palestinians who lives in refugees’ camps from 60 years ago. After each interview, the refugees shows to the camera a sign with the name of the place that they come from. The next image shows the exactly place today. In 1948 the United Nations decided to split the Palestinian territory into two areas in order to create Israel in one of those areas; a state for the Jewish people claimed by the Zionist movement. Instead of including the native Palestinian people in the new Jewish state, Zionist militiamen kicked almost one million Palestinian men and women off their lands who then became refugees. Israel demolished most of the original Palestinian villages and wiped their names off the map. For 59 years one million Palestinians and their descendents have lived in refugee camps in the Occupied Palestine Territories and neighbouring Arab countries. Israel celebrates its day of independence the same day as Palestine commemorates its Nakba (misfortune).

See video:

https://vimeo.com/66678603

Real Estate

Israel/Palestine 2006-2007

Curator: Nirith Nelson

Wooden structure with sign, printed material and four DVDs.
Publication: Real Estate.
Free printed material, unlimited copies, 20 pages. Black and white, 23.5 x 33.2 cm.
4 DVD: Real Estate #1. 23’41’’, Real Estate #2. 8’01’’, Real Estate #3. 10’37’’, Real Estate #4. 5’45’.
Tel Aviv Artists’ Studio, Tel Aviv, May 2007 and La Capella, Barcelona, September 2007. Espai Zero1, Museu de la Garrotxa, Olot, December 2008. Produced by JCVA and ICUB.

 

Real Estate is the result of a long process of delving into the Israeli/Palestinian problem and began in late 2006 following an invitation from the Jerusalem Center for the Visual Arts (JCVA) to carry out a period of residency in Jerusalem and was continued in subsequent visits in 2006 and 2007. The Real Estate installation is presented as a pretend real estate sales office which offers a series of materials (photographs, videos, interviews, free printed material…) which attempt to be visual proof of the complex, problematic relationship within the territory and housing in this context and to show how architecture and urban planning are part of a war strategy staged by the state of Israel within the context of Palestine occupation and these in fact these become one of the most effective systems of domination. An advertising supplement for “Real Estate” can usually be found in Friday’s editions of the country’s newspapers. In these colourful supplements it is quite common to find advertisements for affordable apartments and suburban houses; it is often only after reading the small print that one notices that these houses lie within the Occupied Palestine Territories and are in fact illegal buildings according to international treaties. This project’s ironic use of the title Real Estate aims to highlight the colonial relationship of “property” which the State of Israel and part of Israeli society holds regarding the Occupied Palestine Territories.

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Here/Nowhere

Baltimore, West Cork, Ireland
March–September 2005

Intervention on the ferries that connect Baltimore fishing port with two of the many islands that make up the profile of south-eastern coast of Ireland and wich are used everyday by their inhabitants to go to work. Thousands and thousands of emigrants left the ports of this region heading for America during the famines of 1846-1848. Construction and placement of two signs on the roof of the two ferries with the words Here and Nowhere. Moving text writtten on the landscape.

see video:

https://youtu.be/u0ZAU3iMnNw

Unité Mobile (Roads are also places)

Marseille, 2005
Curator: Martí Peran

Modified Remote Controlled Truck (160 x 64 x 19 cm), The trailer has been substituted for a scale model of the Unité d’Habitation of Marseille (building designed by Le Corbussier in 1947).

Video projection (DVD, 10′ loop), 2005.

Intervention in the interior of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, February 25, 2005. Video recording of the remote-control unit circulating freely in the corridors, elevators and roof of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille.

Video cameraman: Laurent Malone
Video editing: Rafa Ruiz

read more

The video has been exhibited at places such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Rotterdam Architecture Film Festival and at the Vladivostok Film Festival.

*The piece belongs to the Museo de Teruel.

 

Sostenere il palazzo dell’utopia

Photo series, Roma, 2004

Photo Series (11 photos 45 x 60 cm)

The Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, built by Le Corbusier in the 1940’s represents the beginning of a series of architectural projects concerning social housing with clear Utopian inspirations and a radical attempt to transform the common ways of life. We can state that Corviale —inaugurated at the beginning of the 1980’s— is, with all its complexity, one of the last conceptions of this transforming spirit which has finally been left to one side by the dynamics of market forces.
The Sostenere il palazzo dell’utopia (Holding the Building of Utopia) project consists of a series of portraits of Corviale’s inhabitants holding in their hands the model of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, recreating a type of democratic and egalitarian version of medieval imagery (where the powerful: popes, bishops and kings were represented holding the city they had founded), in a modest poetical attempt to re-found the possibility of Utopia.

Zwalm Mailbox Project

Rozebeke, Zwalm, Belgium, 2003

This proposal formed part of the exhibition “Kunst & Zwalm 2003”

The region of Zwalm has an urban structure based on detached houses with gardens, in which there are no examples of the modern architectural tradition. Strangely enough, many of these houses have a mailbox which reproduces an idealised traditional cabin, like those in children’s storybooks.

Wanting to introduce an ironical commentary in this context, Domènec substituted some of the traditional mailboxes with scale models of rationalist constructions, like the Vila Savoia and House no. 13 of Le Corbusier, the Steiner House of Adolf Loos and the Bolle House of Eugeen Liebaut.

*The piece belongs to the Museo de Teruel.

Taquería de los vientos

Los Vientos taco stand

Mexico DF, 2003

Iron, edition of sheets of paper to wrap the tacos in, poster and DVD

A production of Laboratorio Arte Alameda with the collaboration of Arte In Situ / Torre de Los Vientos

Torre de los Vientos (the Wind Tower), the construction with which Gonzalo Fonseca represented the presence of Uruguay in the avenue of sculptures of countries participating in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico

(…) One direction in which it radiates is towards the Torre de los Vientos (the Wind Tower), the construction with which Gonzalo Fonseca represented the presence of Uruguay in the avenue of sculptures of countries participating in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico. Finally, the project took the form of a scale construction of an exact replica converted into a mobile taco stand. For one day, the taco stand opened beside the Torre de los Vientos and, for the exhibition period, it was installed in the environs of the Laboratorio itself.
Domènec usually works with archetypal architectural references of the Modern Movement always with the same intention: to stage the breakdown of modern utopias by converting these constructive referents into domestic, sometimes banal, mere utilitarian scenarios. On this occasion, the Torre de los Vientos, built as a vantage point that was to rise to heights that would offer a view of the future becomes a simple instrument for the sale of foodstuffs, a simple device for a domestic experience, anchored in the real. However, this ousting of the utopian body converted here into a mere object should not be regarded as a melancholic operation; almost quite the opposite, it is more like a celebration of the very possibility of recycling into a true value of use what was previously bathed in an aura of refinement and useless abstraction (…).
In the Los Vientos taco stand, this operation of critical revision of modernity acquires an especially acute register in minor details that could go entirely unnoticed by the consumer of tacos, but which are there to provide a more precise reading of the project. The paper provided at the taco stand to wrap up the food reproduces absolutely significant images: scenes of the massacre in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in 1968. It is important to remember that 1968 was not just the year in which the real Torre de los Vientos was built, it is also the emblematic date marking an irreversible inflexion in the modern process. (Martí Peran)

*The piece belongs to the César Cervantes Collection (Mexico).

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