An intervention at the Mies van der Rhoe and Lilly Reich Pavilion, Barcelona 2018

An production of Mies van der Rohe Foundation and MACBA

Barcelona became Spain’s economic driver in the nineteenth century with the industrial revolution. In a perfect symbiosis of public and private interests, the authorities and the industrialists designed a series of events to internationally disseminate the image of Barcelona as a business city: the Universal Exhibition of 1888 and the 1929 International Exposition that was conceived as a great propaganda device of the Spanish monarchy and to project the image of Catalan industry abroad.

The 1929 Exposition venue, built according to Puig i Cadafalch’s project, was located in Montjuïc and represented a radical transformation of an important part of the mountain.

The industrial and commercial expansion, the transformation and growth of the city and the construction of the buildings of the Exposition needed enormous cheap labour, and the local proletariat was not sufficient to meet demand. This caused a great migration process. Due to the lack of public housing and to speculation policies, many of the families of immigrants who, fleeing misery, came from all over Spain to Barcelona from the mid-nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, were forced to live in very precarious conditions. They lived in self-constructed shacks on the edges of the city forming real neighbourhoods such as the Somorrostro or the Camp de la Bota. In the late fifties, the shanty towns reached their peak with a population of between 70,000 and 100,000 people.

Shacks were built all over Montjuïc, from Poble Sec to the Ponent quarries, from the 1929 International Exposition venue to the castle.

After Spain’s Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship decided to use some of the 1929 International Exposition venues and facilities to place immigrants.  In the beginning of the fifties, The Palace of the Missions became a centre of “classification of indigents” used to arrest and classify immigrants from all over Spain to be returned to their place of origin. Without having committed any crime and after spending an indefinite period of imprisonment, about 15,000 people were deported in about 230 chartered trains. The City Council contributed to aggravating the situation when it decided to use the Olympic Stadium to “temporarily” house the neighbours from the Somorrostro. They remained there until 1968, abandoned by the administration, along with families from other facilities such as the Pavilion of Belgium.

Thanks to: Ivan Blasi, Delícia Burset, Xavi Camino, Helena Castellà, Anna Cerdà, Teresa Grandas, Jordi Mitjà, Dani Montlleó, Anna Ramos.

Public Hearing

2018

Lacquered steel and dyed, varnished okoume plywood
240 × 277 × 164.8 cm

Work produced in collaboration with MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

In May 1963, the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published, drawing together Hannah Arendt’s reports on the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel in the SS and one of the greatest criminals in history. In the Spanish edition, the first chapter of the book is entitled ‘Audiencia pública’ (Public Hearing).

The Audiència pública project (2018) offers a lifesize recreation of the cabin, which was specially designed to ensure Eichmann’s safety during the trial, here converted into a ‘dumb’ sculpture, aseptic and divested of all traces of the drama that was played out but at the same time ‘noisy’, as it echoes the voices of the victims of history. If, as Zygmunt Bauman states, the Holocaust, far from being a deviation in the passage of progress, appears as the technological and organisational result of industrial and bureaucratic society, and is a phenomenon tightly linked to the very characteristics of modernity, where do we place ourselves in the face of this small piece of architecture that challenges us? What role do we take in this public hearing?

To the Dead Heroes of the Revolution, 2018

Sandblasted stainless steel
156 x 156 x 89 cm
Work produced in collaboration with MACBA

The monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, very forceful and formally and politically effective, became a meeting point for the German radical left. To reinforce its political function, beyond the metaphor of the volumes of used factory adobe bricks, Mies van der Rohe also designed a series of elements of normal communist political symbology: a large steel five-pointed star with a hammer and sickle in its centre and a pole on which to hoist the Red Flag on major occasions.

The star measured two metres and eighty centimetres across and a small manufacturer could not be commissioned to make it and thus Mies van der Rohe commissioned the Krupp steelworks. The Krupps, a major German industrial dynasty later known for their collaboration with Nazism and the use of slave labour during the Second World War, refused to supply a communist symbol. Faced with this refusal, the architect ordered five pieces of diamond-shaped steel, five pieces divested of any political significance, which Krupp agreed to supply. Once they had been assembled, they became the five-pointed star which presided over the monument until it was taken down by the Nazis and exhibited in a museum of insignia and flags which had been confiscated from enemies.

The Den toten Helden der Revolution piece (To the Dead Heroes of the Revolution, 2018) recreates this prior moment of impasse, in which five silent geometric shapes, at rest, can unleash their capacity for political activism.

Photos 5 and 6: Roberto Ruiz / Photo 7: Jordi Folgado

LE CAP – Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons (Lyon). 2017

Photo Series (4 photos 45 x 60 cm)

LE CAP – Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons (Lyon), 2017
En Résonance avec la Biennale de Lyon 2017

Installation. 4 models, screen, wood / Video, 3’24” / Wall paper

Video edition: Rafa Ruiz

with the support of Institut Ramon Llull

2017
27 postcards. Free printed material, unlimited copies. 10 X 15 cm.

Edition of a collection of postcards that offer some alternative “souvenirs” (memories) to the stereotype, optimistic and amiable imagery offered by both private and institutional tourist publicity. In a perfect symbiosis of interests, for more than a century an image of Barcelona full of clichés has been built up: the highbrow, modern, colourful, Mediterranean, welcoming city, etc. – in short, a theme park that hides a history of marginalisation and misery, class struggle, bloody popular revolts and ferocious repression.

A project produced for the exhibition “Ciutat de Vacances”.
A production of Arts Santa Mònica.

Thanks to: Xose Quiroga, Pau Faus, Daniela Ortiz, Ramón Parramón.

2016

Wooden model and three Formica chairs. Wood table, glass, digital print.

A production of ADN, as part of the solo exhibition “Dom Kommuna. Domestic Architectural Manuals for Coexistence”. ADN Platform, Sant Cugat, Barcelona.

Dom Kommuna. Domestic Architectural Manuals for Coexistence.
Domènec has worked repeatedly on the architectural paradigms of Modernity. He offers a critical view on the symbolic constructions of Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe or le Corbusier, with the aim of identifying architecture as the “political unconscious” of modernity. As Walter Benjamin grasped, the architects’ projects constituted the best embodiment of the powerless Modernity’s dream to accomplish emancipatory and welfare promises.

Social housing is the place where the contradictions between ideological programs and political realities are most reflected.

Domènec’s proposal for ADN platform gathers a collection of works that revolve around this topic. The central piece is a new production on Casa Bloc, a workers’ housing complex constructed between 1933 and 1939 in Sant Andreu, Barcelona. Two other related pieces complete the display: Domestic (2000), about Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, and Conversation Piece: Narkomfin (2013).

The proposal studies these three fundamental common housing projects, as well as their political contexts and their dystopian drifts.

*This artwork belongs to the “La Caixa” Contemporary Art Collection

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Myohoji Temple, Sakai (Osaka), Japan. 2016

Wood, fluorescent light, plastic sheet, several objects.
182 x 66 x 60 cm.

‘no jyuku sha’
There seem to be about 25 000 homeless people in Japan. Some of them describe themselves as ‘no jyuku sha’ or ‘field campers’ – as they manage to settle in parks and other public spaces on a more permanent basis, easily distinguishable by their tent houses made of stark blue plastic covers.
Especially in Osaka, these ‘campers’ not only organize themselves increasingly over the internet, they also engage in political activities to stand up for their rights and protest against the increasing park clearings by the municipality.

Sakai Shelter was part of Sacay Arte Porto.
Produced by Sakai Art Project.

Acknowledgments: Akane Asaoka, Kengo Shibatsuji, Takeshi Nakamura, MyohojiTemple, Community Cafe Pangea.

The Collectivization of Everything

P74 Gallery, Ljubljana. 2015

“Among the periphery of modernity belongs the phenomenon of socialist modernism, which has remained long decades on the margin of expert analysis. With the cycle “Modernity” that we began at P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute several years ago, we contemplate the ambivalences, limitations and consequences of modernity and simultaneously encourage new, critical readings. This year we have begun a new programme of artistic residencies. Our first guest is the acclaimed visual artist from Barcelona, Domènec.

The current exhibition presents two interconnected, and even complementary, projects: the project Voyage en Icarie (Journey to Icaria) (2012) and the new installation Kolektivizacija vsega (The Collectivisation of Everything) (2015). The latter came into being based on Domènec’s research of sculptor Zdenko Kalin’s monument to one of the founders of the Communist Party of Slovenia and the Anti-Imperialist Front and leader of the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People, Boris Kidric.

In 2012 Domènec was invited to the Museum of Contemporary Arts Metelkova (MSUM) in Ljubljana to lead a workshop. While walking through the city, he came across some street graffiti with the text “Kolektivizacija vsega!” (Collectivisation of everything!) and took a photo of it. An interesting discussion followed with the participants of the workshop about the heritage of the socialistic period and of the ambiguous relationship to that past. Twenty-four years after the declaration of Slovenian independence and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the understanding of recent history is still problematic. In such a context, how do we position the memorial statue of Boris Kidric We can understand the statue of Boris Kidri? in a packing case as an unpleasant presence of the spirit of the past, reminding us of the mistakes that we made or demanding that we once again consider and attempt utopian alternatives to global capitalism.

In the middle of the 19th century, the French utopian socialist Étienne Cabet developed in his novel Voyage en Icarie the idea of the future as a just society in which there was no property and no money. In 1848, a group of adventurers followed Cabet’s call and left for Texas, with the goal of building their own Icaria. The journey ended in tragedy. The video work poetically restores and illuminates the memory of the event and its protagonists, who in the 19th century, in the time of the rise of wild capitalism, dared to imagine an alternative society and even tried to live it.”
(P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute, Ljubljana, setembre 2015)

Kolektivizacija vsega

Packing case, 430 x 200 x 130 cm

Four black and white photos, 40 x 60 cm c / u. Documentation of the creation process monument to Boris Kidric found in the archives of the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia.

Color photos found on the Internet, unknown authors.

Produced by P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute / P74 Gallery

2015

DVD, 30’
Directors: Domènec and Sàgar Malé
Script: Sàgar Malé, Kilian Estrada, Domènec
Camera: Maria Acázar, Maria Cilleros, Kilian Estrada, Sàgar Malé
Edition: Kilian Estrada
Voice: Mònica Subirats
Production: Mapasonor
Text: ‘The Monster’s Tail’ Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir
a documentary film by MAPASONOR
Mapasonor ACD 2015