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

Icaria is not an avenue

Avenida Icaria, Barcelona, 2015
Curator: Andrea Rodriguez Novoa
Curatorial Clube
13.02.15

Icaria is an island imagined by the french philosopher and utopian socialist Étiénne Cabet in his book « Voyage en Icarie »(1839), in it he describes a social model that is antagonic to capitalism. One of the catalonian followers of the icaria project was the engineer Ildefonso Cerdá, author of the Barcelonean “Ensanche” (urbanistic expansion plan) named the Avenue that still bears this name.

Ildefons Cerdà, an admirer, more or less secretly, of Cabet’s utopian ideas, in memory of this community, in his Urban Plan of Barcelona – which was ultimately an egalitarian proposal – planned to call Avinguda d’Icària the road formerly called Camí del Poble Nou Cemetery; even in some drawings and plans it indicates a whole large area of Poble Nou under the name of Icària.

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At 12:30 pm on a Saturday we met in the crossroad between Avenida Icària and the calle Marina de Barcelona. We gathered some stones in the nearby area and at 1:00 pm we walked from the avenue to the Cementerio General de Barcelona, in Poble Nou. On the way the artist distributes three hundred xerox copies in A4 in black and white with the phrases

« Icària no es una avinguda.
https://voyageenicarie.wordpress.com ».

We went down the avenue again until the point of origin watching the xerox copies. Some of the papers will stay there until the next working day, others may stay longer, and some have already started to fly away. It’s 3:15 pm.

Demolished Monument is a proposal for “restoring” the demolition of the monument to General Prim in Barcelona’s Parc de la Ciutadella.

Nonument, MACBA, Barcelona, 2014
Curators: Josep Bohigas & Bartomeu Marí.
A production of MACBA, Barcelona.

Model and digital print.

Edition of 3

In 1871 the people of Paris rose up in arms and established the Commune on the basis of anarchist and socialist principles. On 16 May, the revolutionary government tore down the Vendôme column. The column, erected on the orders of Napoleon to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, was considered by the Commune as «a monument of barbarism, an affirmation of militarism, a permanent insult to the defeated and an attack on fraternity».

After the Commune had been brought down by the French army, the Government, under the presidency of General Mac Mahon, had the column rebuilt.

In 1882 Barcelona’s authorities decided to erect a monument to General Prim, soldier and politician, who wad been responsible for bombing the city and crushing of the «Jamància» popular uprising of 1843, as well as the brutal repression of African slaves in 1848 when he was Capitan-general of Puerto Rico.

On 20 December 1936, in the first few months of the Spanish Civil War and in the middle of the revolutionary process, the Joventuts Llibertàries, (anarchist youth movement) demolished the monument.

In 1948 Franco’s municipal authorities decided to rebuild the monument and commissioned sculptor Frederic Marès to produce a copy of the original sculpture.

Political iconoclasm as a form of expropriation of the symbolic heritage of the oligarchy and the construction of the public space.

Model maker:
Oriol Poch

photo labels:
Pérez de Rozas, 1936. Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
Josep Brangulí, 1936. Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya

Project for the Web, 2014

In the framework of the cycle “Outdoors. Three contemporary narratives of fragility: Isabel Banal, Domènec and Toni Giró” curated by Jordi Font.
Container. IGAC

The project consists of an intervening cartography of Occupied Palestinian Territories from Google Maps (1). The hundreds of images of fragments of territory (200 meters away from the ground) have been captured on the computer screen and recomposed as a puzzle to build an immense aerial image. A material obtained with a technology of military origin (photography by satellite and geolocation) initially restricted, which is now accessible to everyone on the web. But all this over-information, all this alleged “hypervisibility” hides, in fact, the logic of Israeli occupation. The intervention on the map, in a kind of reverse cartography, is to manually erase all Palestinian traces and leave only visible the web of settlements, military bases (2) and exclusive routes for Israelis that cross the whole territory and make imposible its normal functioning as a country. In the act of being erased, the Palestinians become visible as “naked life” in a void space of law, in a state of permanent exception.

1 / The documents leaked by Edward Snowden have revealed that Google Maps is part of the global surveillance network operated by several Western intelligence agencies.
2 / Some of the military installations do not appear in Google Maps images, as they are deliberately deleted or camouflaged for “security reasons.”

Spanish Architecture, 1939 -1975
(2013 – 2018)

Curator: Àlex Mitrani.

Series of 20 images, digital copies on aluminium each measuring 45 x 60 cm.
A Production of MAC Mataró Art Contemporani (2014) and MACBA (2018).

After the civil war hundreds of thousands of Republican prisoners were sentenced to forced labour. Terri de Mataró (artist and cultural activist), explains in his memoirs his experience in the Battalions of Punished Workers: “I lived scenes of bloody violence, epic drunkenness, cruelties spawned from whims. I came into touch with human degradation. In Africa I wished to die as never before.” Numerous public infrastructures and government buildings, from the Guadalquivir Canal to the sinister Valle de los Caídos, were built by the State or by private companies with the relevant concession, employing a cheap workforce held in captivity.

Francisco Prieto-Moreno wrote the presentation of the architecture section in the catalogue of the III Biennial of Latin American Art held in Barcelona in 1955: “What [architecture] now needs is only the creative genius of the individual.” Francisco Prieto Moreno, who was to head the National Devastated Regions and Repairs Service among other positions, defended traditionalist aesthetic with an idealistic hazy rhetoric. But, above all, his quote on the genius of the architect is just one example of the perverse cynicism of Franco’s discourse, where propaganda hid the fierce repression and a pompous heroism protected the most ignominious shame.

Domènec offers us a catalogue of some of the public works made with the sweat and blood of Republican prisoners that is both accurate and disturbing and which is perfectly outlined and depicted with luminous clarity. The black he has chosen for this prolongs the existentialist and demanding darkness of informalist abstraction, and also forms a link with the tradition of the dark side of Spain. The cold and uncomfortable cataloguing reveals for us the architectural traces of human and political crime in its objectivity and contrast. (Àlex Mitrani)

*The complete edition 3 of 3 (20 images) of “Spanish Architecture, 1939-1975” belongs to the Mataró Museum (Col·lecció Nacional d’Art Contemporani)

2013

Wooden model and Formica chairs.

Intervention in the Casa Capell, Mataró, as part of the “Hidden Modernity” project.

Conversation Piece is a term used to describe a type of paintings from the 18th century. The conversation pieces are usually portraits of groups of family or friends engaged in conversation in domestic environments. Eventually, however, this term led to defining any object or part thereof which caused debate because of its unusual status.

This particular Conversation Piece placed two Formica chairs, typical of things found in homes in the 50s and 60s face to face and a model of the Narkomfin social housing building was used to bridge them: an unusual object that provokes conversation.

In the 1930s, Le Corbusier travelled to the Soviet Union to learn about the radical experiments of collectivism and social housing undertaken by young Russian architects, and the Narkomfin is the most emblematic building of this experiment, which was aborted by Stalinism. Le Corbusier talks about the success and failure of these social experiments from which he drew lessons for his great project of collective housing: the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille.

*Property of: Col·lecció “La Caixa” Art Contemporani

GIF, a project for the Arts Coming Website.
2013

In 1871 the government of the Paris Commune – the first autonomous insurrection of the proletariat, according to Marx – demolished the Vendome Column in a highly symbolic act of political iconoclasm. The column, which was erected by order of Napoleon Bonaparte to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz and to honor the glory of the Imperial Navy, was considered by the Commune as “a monument to barbarism, an assertion of militarism, a permanent insult of the conquerors to the vanquished, and an attack against fraternity.”

Journey to Icaria

Ingràvid, Figueres, 2012

Pyrotechnic sign and wooden structure, 840 x 300 x 150 cm.

Table with documents

Video (2’43”) produced in collaboration with Can Xalant, Centre de Creació i Pensament Contemporani de Mataró.

See video:
http://vimeo.com/115176342

Voyage to Nowhere

Nowhere is, in the typical rhetoric of Modernity, the space of utopia (from the Greek ou, “no” and topos, “place”, which literally means “nowhere”) and is always situated somewhere beyond the horizon in a perpetual, unachievable future. In the mid 19th century the French philosopher and utopian socialist Étienne Cabet put forward his ideas in Voyage en Icarie, a novel inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia, which envisaged a future fair and just society in which there would be no property or money.

The Icaria project achieved wide acclaim among the working class in Catalonia; and one of its most renowned followers was Narcís Monturiol who hailed from the town of Figueres in the north of Catalonia.

In 1848 following a call by Cabet, a group of adventurers, which included a number of Catalans, set sail for Texas with the aim of building their own Icaria; alas this ephemeral adventure turned out to be a tragic failure.

This intervention aims to poetically restitute and “shed light on” the historic memory of events and people that in the nineteenth century, in the midst of growing wild capitalism, in addition to fighting to improve living conditions, they dared to imagine alternative societies and try to put it in practice.

To install in the Rambla de Figueres, close to the monument dedicated to Narcís Monturiol, a pyrotechnic sign and text that lights up this utopian attempt for one brief moment: Voyage en Icarie.

Simultaneously a “small Icarian library” is laid out, a simple display that includes material, documents, texts and images of the Icarian adventure, together with other utopian projects from the period and information on groups that today are attempting to build alternative social platforms to the capitalist system.

2012

Edición para Arts Coming
First edition of 50
Vaporized beech wood, varnish. 30 x 8 x 10 cm
This work includes assembly instructions and timeline.

In 2002, the artist built a reproduction to scale of the monument to Rosa Luxemburgo, Karl Liebknecht and the Spartakists killed by the German police in 1919. This monument was designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928 and destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. The original project designed by the rationalist architect held a constructivist syntax and was dedicated to the leaders of the German revolutionary proletariat, two reasons why this should have been demolished by the nazi state and a great allegory on the failure of the political project of Modernity. The work by Domènec, based on this episode, is called Existenzminimum and the monument became a tiny, portable dwelling which brought back to us the memory of Europe’s recent history from unhappiness to the present.

This work was erected in the parque de la Devesa in Girona and later at the Fundació Espais. More recently, in 2010, the construction formed part of the exhibition entitled Modernologies in the MACBA (Barcelona) and contributed new comprehensive interpretations on the passing of time and the political troubles of at the crucial times of the past. Now, without renouncing the political significance, the structure built on a smaller scale has now become a building game which allows one to continue activating critical interpretations. The wooden pieces we have to handle contain a profound reflection on aesthetics of resistance, within reach of everyone.

The Worker’s Hand

Helsinki, 2011 – 2012
2 channel HD video installation, 46’
Photo series, 8 C-prints, 70 x 50 cm each.
Scale model of Kulttuuritalo. Fired clay.
Documents and pictures from Kansan Arkisto.

The exhibition The Worker’s Hand (Rakentajan käsi) presents Domènec’s new installation, which seeks to revisit the forgotten history of Kulttuuritalo (The House of Culture) designed by Alvar Aalto and built in 1952–58 in what was then the working class district of Kallio in Helsinki. The installation is the result of Domènec’s collaborative research with Helsinki-based Spanish curator Jon Irigoyen. The project was devised and carried out during Domènec’s artist residency at HIAP Suomenlinna in autumn 2011 and summer 2012.

Kulttuuritalo, a cultural complex housing a concert hall, offices, a theatre and a library, was commissioned by the SKP (Communist Party of Finland), and largely built by volunteers. The exhibition focuses on the volunteer workers, trade unionists and families who responded to the SKP’s call to build a “house for all workers” and gave more than 500,000 hours of their lives to the realisation of the project.

Revisiting the history of the construction of Kulttuuritalo, Domènec’s project aims to recover the memories of the numerous militant workers and volunteers who participated in the collective construction of this symbol of modernism and icon of the Finnish labour movement. At the same time, the exhibition addresses the historical gap between the era when Kulttuuritalo was commissioned by the SKP, and the present moment, when the building has been transformed into an architectural monument stripped of its ideological ‘baggage’. This attempt to revisit the past prompts reflections on the collapse of the modern project and on the way we experience historical time.

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“We were going to help the evenings after our work or days off. We had a great hope of achieving self Cultural House. It was a project that we felt very special: a building designed by a famous architect and built by volunteers from the left. Many thought it would never come to completion the building, because it was a project organized by the labour movement ”

Fragment of conversation with Riitta Suhonen, 73 years old; when she was 15, she participated as a volunteer in building the Kulttuuritalo, designed by Alvar Aalto.

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Thanks to:

HIAP, Can Xalant Center for Creation and Contemporary Knowledge of Mataró, Institut Ramon Llull, CoNCA, Spanish Embassy in Finland, Pixelache Festival, The Association of Pensioners (Eläkeläiset ry), Pirjo Kaihovaara, Tiina Rajala, José M. Sánchez (Kinetic Pixel), Ernest Borras, Berta Julibert.

Special thanks:

Kansan Arkisto and the Kulttuuritalo volunteers: Eine Kauppila, Osmo Halenius, Kerttu Laine, Antero Koski, Matti Lääperi, Toivo Lindroos, Elbe Novitsky, Irja Pesonen, Sisko Salonen, Petteri Sosoi, Riitta Suhonen, Tapio Rajala, Veijo Sinisalo.

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This project has been shown in different places like:

Kaapelin Galleria, Helsinki, 2012
EspaiDos, Sala Muncunill, Terrassa, 2014
MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Barcelona, 2018
Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018. Kochi, 2018
Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila, 2019
Halfhouse, Barcelona, 2021
Kuva/Tila, Helsinki, 2022