Video, 4’ 24’’

Project carried out for the publication CAPS.A. 11 in prison

Intervention in the prison of Mataró, 2011

Video edited with the collaboration of Can Xalant, Centre de Creació i Pensament Contemporani de Mataró.

Panoptic adj. Showing or seeing the whole at one view.

Device designed by the English thinker Jeremy Bentham in 1791. The panoptic enables the guard to see (-opticon) all (pan-) the prisoners without knowing if they are being watched or not.

French philosopher Michel Foucault thoroughly analyzed the concept of panoptic –the eye that sees all – in his work published in 1975 entitled Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Watch and punish: The birth of prisons).

…Bentham raised the issues in terms of power: the population as the target of the relationships of domination. (…) One look is enough. A glance that controls, and which each, feeling its burden, ends up interiorizing to the extent of watching oneself…

Mataró prison (Elies Rogent, 1858). This was the first prison built in Spain according to the panoptic system.

2011 – 2015

Inkjet printing on paper, wood and single-channel video,
colour, sound, 46min 40s
Model: 2.5 x 101 x 205
41 photographs of various sizes

“As in all real cities, we have constructed mosques, a kasbah and even a refugee camp”
Arick Moré, lieutenant colonel of the Israel Defense Forces

The Baladia Future City project (2011/2015) is centred on the Baladia City National Urban Training Center, popularly known as ‘Chicago’, a military training centre near the Tze’elim military base in the Negev desert in southern Israel. It is a model city of 7.4 square kilometres which consists of 1,100 basic modules which the planners of the military mission can reconfigure with the aim of representing specific Arab cities. Israel’s Defence Forces use it to plan for war in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria and its construction was financed largely with the help of the United States military.

In the essay ‘Slouching towards dystopia: the new military futurism’, the writer and journalist Matt Carr analyses a series of military reports which imagine future threats to security. This new military futurism sees as risks to the western way of life the scarcity of resources, large-scale migration and the growth of failed macro-cities. Military futurologists set out an eminently urban war scenario, of house-to-house fighting. As Mike Davis, sociologist for the Pentagon states, the ‘failed cities’ of countries in the Global South have been identified as ‘the key battlefield of the future’.

This installation is laid out as a display and a documentary archive which collates images – the majority produced by the soldiers themselves and found on the internet, YouTube and Facebook – and a model of the city based on Google Earth photographs. In 2015, a video filmed in Tel Aviv was added to the project, in which three soldiers in the Israeli army reserves explain their personal experience in this pretend city.

Following an interview conducted by architect Eyal Weizman with the commander and instructor of the Operational Theory Research Institute of the Israeli special intervention forces, Avi Kokhavi (architect and career officer, responsible for military operations in the Nablus casbah and the Balata refugee camp), Weizman states with surprise that the theoretical bases used by the Israeli army to develop new military techniques in urban warfare are repeatedly based on texts by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and situationism, among other things, and wonders about the use of these critical theories as ‘tools’ in the hands of military thinkers (1). He also confirms how the same instructors use concepts and references from architecture and contemporary art, such as some notions developed by Gordon Matta-Clark (2).

The project, also, aims at exploring the paradoxes between architectural trends developed in Israel since the 70s as an attempt to provide the architecture with “local identity” –by appropriating the Palestinian imaginary– and the “international style” developed during the first decades of the new state, and their most dystopian deviation: the fake city of Baladia.

1 Eyal Weizman: ‘Walking through wall. Soldiers as architects in the Israeli / Palestinian conflict’, Arxipèlag d’excepcions. Barcelona: CCCB, 2007.

2 Eyal Weizman: ‘Walking through wall. Soldiers as architects in the Israeli / Palestinian conflict’, op. cit.

………………….

Curator: Maral Mikirditsian

Model maker: Oriol Poch

Acknowledgements: Achiya Schatz, Avner Gvaryahu, Shay Davidovich, Breaking the Silence, Miki Kratsman, Nirith Nelson, Martí Peran.

*The piece belongs to the MACBA Collection.

Mexico City, 2011

Produced as part of the “Hand to Hand with General Cárdenas” project by Antimuseum of Contemporary Art in Mexico DF.

Curator: Tomás Ruiz-Rivas

This replica of the Monument to the Third International designed by Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin in 1920 but never actually made, is a paradigm of utopian architecture and a symbol of the revolution that always remained unfinished. The replica is made from such materials, and in a size and colours which lend it a child-like touch, turning it into urban furniture, a children’s climbing frame.

It was installed temporarily in the gardens of the Parque España (Condesa colony), close to the monument commemorating General Cárdenas, a revolutionary officer and President of Mexico (1934-1940). The monument was later moved and finally installed in the gardens of the Faro de Oriente cultural centre in Iztapalapa, in the impoverished outskirts of Mexico City.

Installation. 2 models, table and fluorescent light.

Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona. 2010

Project produced for the exhibition “Salvat-Papasseit, poetavanguardistacatala”.

Curators: Pilar Bonet and Maia Creus

Joan Salvat-Papasseit, Catalan avant-garde poet and revolutionary, was always optimistic about social change and defended education and culture as basic tools for revolutions and to achieve emancipation.

In 1924, at the age of 30, he died of tuberculosis in his dark, damp flat in Argenteria Street in Barcelona.

Ten years later, in 1934, during the Republic, members of the GATCPAC (J.L. Sert, B. Subirana and J. Torres Clavé) were commissioned by the Regional government of Catalonia to design the first tuberculosis health centre (1934-1938) located at the heart of el Raval neighbourhood, as part of the programme to socialise hospital care and fight against tuberculosis. This revolutionary, regenerating action to improve living conditions for the working class was commissioned by the republican regional government of Catalonia and backed by the most modern thinking professionals and intellectuals in the country. However this project was violently aborted in 1939 following the victory of fascism.

This fracture of 10 years, spanning the death of the poet and beginning the hospital became a tragic metaphor emphasising the distance between desires and dreams and the (always slim) chance of achieving them.

In a completely white room lies a large table. Upon the table lie two wooden models: the model of the house in Argenteria Street where Salvat-Papasseit passed away and the model of the Tuberculosis Hospital. Lying like isolated pieces at each end of the large table, highlighting this fracture.

Model maker: Oriol Poch

Idensitat #5

Manresa, 2009/2010

The artist proposes the construction of a replica of Plácido’s Motocarro (tricycle) as part of a training and professional reintegration program for youngsters. Plácido (a film made in 1961, mainly shot in Manresa, considered to be one of the best films of Luis G. Berlanga).
The tricycle would be turned into a mobile “commemorative monument” , an ironic device and a capsule of critical memory, and through its movement around the streets would restore a landscape and would recreate the others’ landscape.Plácido’s Motocarro could be used in many forms and be the catalyst for different events; as a small, mobile multimedia display, the support for an open air video projector, or it could use its loudspeakers to communicate and spread the activities of different collectives. Also it could be used as a means of transportation for “alternative tourism” in emerging urban spaces of Manresa.

With the collaboration of Jordi Aligué Pujals, Balan Mihaita Catalin, Dima Nicolae Alexandra, Joan Segarra Jordana, students of the Institute Lacetènia tutored by Professor Pere Maria Izquierdo.

Living without leaving a trace

Ostende, Argentina, 2009.

Project:

Engage a professional sign writer to hand paint a banner with the words by Walter Benjamin “Living without leaving a trace”.

To hang the banner (called “pasacalles” in Argentina) inside an abandoned half-built house and leave it there.

It is quite usual in Argentina –both for political organisations and trade unions to divulge their messages, and for individuals to announce birthdays, etc…– to engage professionals to hand paint banners and murals.

Perpignan, 2008

Domènec Project with the collaboration of Michael Barnabé, Séverine Peron, Nicolas Daubanes and Elric Dufau for the pediatric ward of the Hospital in Perpignan, kindergarten for the children of the hospital staff and the residence house parents of hospitalized children.

Project carried out under the public program “Art at Hopital” coordinated by Isabelle Narcy.

Jerusalem, 2007

4 colour photographs on aluminium. 45×60 cm. each. Edition of 3.

Four images of night time in Jerusalem, two taken in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Beit Hanina in the east of the city and two taken in the west of the city. Despite their similarities, two scenes with fire and two buildings in darkness, closer inspection highlight the conflict and underlying violence of the occupation.

In the picture of fire, which was taken in the Palestinian zone, a burning waste bin can be seen; although Palestinians in Jerusalem pay the same municipal taxes as the Jewish residents, the city’s waste collection services never collect the waste in the eastern area. Residents there are forced to burn it. The other picture containing fire is the traditional Jewish feast of lag Ba’omer. In the western neighbourhoods of the city and in the Israeli settlements bonfires are lit and people dance in circles around them.

This apparent similarity may also be seen in the other two photographs, two buildings in darkness. Yet one, left half-built is like a ship beached in the outskirts of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Beit Hanina. The other portrays a house in a residential area in the west of the city, just the awning on the right of the picture tells us the house is inhabited and breaks down the feeling of a phantom fort.

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

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