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.

2018

Wood, Photo series.

Y la tierra será el paraíso (And the earth will be paradise), the title of this piece, is a verse from the most popular version in Spanish of the L’Internationale, the anthem of the working class par excellence, adopted by most of the socialist parties , communists and anarchists of the world. This verse perfectly sums up the utopian character of modernity, a time in which the idea that everything good was about to arrive was spread.

The project I “And the earth will be paradise” (2018) consists of a photographic series and wooden models that, stacked on top of each other, form a sculptural tower. These models represent the gigantic blocks of Social Housing Estate in La Mina, a neighborhood located on the outskirts of Barcelona that was built in the early seventies to rehouse the population from different shantytowns, and where the worst vices of impunity and political incompetence. Two archival photographs are shown next to these models; one, from 1970, shows the dictator Franco and the mayor of Barcelona posing next to the model of the La Mina neighborhood project, the other shows a group of women, relocated to this same neighborhood, holding the model of the their hut in Camp de la Bota, built by themselves with cardboard.

Again we see the image of power presenting itself in an overbearing manner as the benefactors of the population through large building campaigns, in front of the image of the victims of this power, the lowest classes of society, who appropriate the urban space making use of the few resources at their disposal.

The project is completed with a photographic series showing estates of large social housing buildings. Domènec, who has taken these snapshots in cities as diverse as Barcelona, Warsaw, Bratislava, Marseille, Nantes or Mexico City, does not indicate these origins. In this way, evidence of how the presence and aesthetics of this type of large housing projects, present on the outskirts of all major cities in the world, are a global sign of imposition from political and economic power.

Photos: Roberto Ruiz, courtesy of ADN Gallery, Barcelona

2018

ADN Platform

For this exhibition in ADN Platform, Domènec presents another product of the so called Modern project. It is the iconic BKF chair, an aesthetic and functional proposal also known as “Butterfly chair” because of its morphological resemblance to the insect. The prototype consists of two symmetrical tubular pieces welded and covered by a piece of leather. A simple and soft design that also evokes the natural in its curved and sinuous forms. A morphological object that acquires an almost sculptural, even architectural, value while fulfilling its main function, that of the seat.

Created between 1938 and 1939, the BKF was designed by exiled Catalan architect Antoni Bonet Castellana and the Argentines Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy. They met each other while working at Le Corbusier’s office in 1936. Two years later the three architects created the Austral group (1938 – 1941).

The BKF become one of the most famous designs in history. In 1944, Edgar kaufmann, MoMA’s director of Industrial Design collection at that time, acquired one BKF for the museum’s collections and two more for the iconic “Waterfall House” (Frank Lloyd Wright), example par excellence of this rationalist Modern architecture. Austral group’s proposal turned out to be another perfect example of avant-garde design and would soon become part of its history.

As usual in Domènec’s processes, with this installation the artist examines the iconic design from a new point of view. The two BKF chairs appear without their coating, the piece of leather that covers them and making us possible to sit on them. Its original function is thus nullified and now the structures are ready for being used in different ways. One of these alternatives of use could be the one we see in the dictator Francisco Franco that appears near the chairs. The dictator uses the naked frames of the chairs to proudly display his hunting trophies: two deer heads whose baroque antlers oppose the soft and synthetic lines of the BKFs’ skeletons. Ortega y Gasset said once that hunting, (also called “cynegetics”) consist of everything that is done before and after the dead of the animal, being the death a key part in the process. We can find here a certain resemblance with the evolution of modernity, an idealistic project that suffered from constantly harassment until its very crisis. The entire installation causes in its viewers a strange confusion resulting from the clash between and object based on a very specific social ideals (progress, improvement of quality life and the development of an equitable community) versus some conservative, even retrograde standars.

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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