published in Perro Berde (Manila, Philippines, 2019).

On February 2019, the Ateneo Art Gallery hosts Domènec’s exhibit titled Not Here, Not Anywhere, organized in collaboration with Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and with assistance from the Embassy of Spain in the Philippines. The exhibit features selected works from the MACBA show as well as two new works Domènec created after a 10-day visit to Manila and as a response to the Philippine context. He is also one of the featured speakers at the 2019 Art Fair Philippines art talks. The following Q & A explores the artist’s background as well as his insights on the role of artists in revisiting the past, reassessing history, and recovering the voice of the voiceless.

ATENEO ART GALLERY:
For the benefit of Philippine readers, can you give us an overview of your beginnings or early years as an artist?

DOMÈNEC:
My years of learning coincide with the last years of the 80s; my first relevant exhibition is from 1989.

In 1975, the dictator dies after 40 years in power and a period of transition begins, to a democracy full of conflicts and tensions between the oligarchic and conservative structures that seek, and in part achieve, holding on to power, and the desire among the general population, women, workers, students … to initiate a deep and radical change. This period of political turmoil, which I experience intensely as a high school student, we could say—and simplifying a bit—ends in 1982 when the Socialist Party wins the elections by an absolute majority. For the first time since 1939, Spain is governed by a president not involved with the fascist dictatorship. It was the beginning of a period of euphoria resulting from an act of collective forgetfulness, when no one will be judged for the crimes of the dictatorship (there are still tens of thousands of unidentified corpses in mass graves scattered throughout the country).

In the context of art, this period of euphoria, amnesia, and superficiality coincides with the period of a speculative bubble of the art market. Universities and schools also participate, in a certain way, in this process, producing an interruption in the transmission of knowledge between our generation and the generation of Spanish artists of the 70s, much more involved in artistic practices committed to experimentation, social criticism, or political commitment.

We could say that it was at the end of the 80s and in the first half of the 90s when some young artists began to configure other ways of working beyond the parameters established by public institutions and the art market of the time, starting, among other things, to reconstruct the relationship with the local tradition of conceptual and political art. For example, the work of artists, such as Francesc Abad[1] (1944), who were absolutely invisible during the 80s, becomes fundamental in reintroducing the recovery of the memory of the victims of the dictatorship in the 90s with their project El Camp de la Bota.

AAG:
What were the circumstances that led to your current art practice? Or what led you to focus on modernity and architecture and urban planning as points of interest and criticism?

D:
I have always been very interested in architecture, as well as in contemporary history and political theory, but it was more than twenty years ago, in the middle of the 90s, in a historical moment characterized by the triumph of global capitalism and the apparent defeat of all the attempts to build alternative scenarios, that I started through my artistic practice to ask myself about the role of the artist in society and about myself as a contemporary subject.

Of the artistic practices, architecture is the one that, in a more radical and sometimes even traumatic way, affects the daily life of people and at the same time is intersected by all the conflicts and political contradictions. This makes it an ideal territory to analyze how the different processes of modernity materialize, even where different “modernities” collide.

The intimate, complex, dangerous, and often contradictory relationship established by architecture with ideology and social utopias on the one hand, and with oligarchic power, the market, and speculation on the other, constitute a perfect field to deploy contemporary artistic practice as a process of analysis and criticism.

Precisely when the housing utopias derived from the Athens Charter[1] (1933) are completely shipwrecked in the metropolitan peripheries of the whole world, it is more pertinent to replant the question of how to live together.

AAG:
How does an art project begin for you? What interests you in pursuing further research on a specific topic or historical event or period?

D:

This depends on many variables, but we could say that there are two types of projects. Self-generated projects, that is, projects that are the result of the general process of my research and interests, and projects generated from a context, whether social, geographic, political, or specific. For example, a project on Soviet utopian architecture like Conversation Piece: Narkomfin would be an example of the first typology. I have never been to Moscow and therefore the project does not respond to a reaction to a specific context, but to a process of a more general reflection on the limits of the modern project.

On the other hand, the long series of projects on the context of Israel and Palestine (Real Estate, 48_Nakba, Erased Land, or Baladia Future City) are the direct result of an intense relationship with a specific geographical context initiated by an invitation from Nirith Nelson, an Israeli curator, to work in that place. Many of my projects start this way, from an invitation to stay in a new context. From this trigger, I begin a more or less long process of immersion and investigation of this context. I apply what I call a “bastard” research process that works at many levels, from the physical experience of the place, the route, observation and listening, to conversation with all kinds of people and agents—from the food vendor in the street to the political activist, from the taxi driver or the refugee to the journalist or the academic—or to the consultation of historical archives or specialized readings. Finally the resulting project is a kind of “response” to the place.

AAG:
It has been noted (in the catalogue essay) that you view architecture as a “political unconscious“. Can you expound on this?

D:
There is a phrase that says “no building is innocent”, which perfectly defines this concept. A formalistic and academic analysis of architecture would center its interest on the formal and aesthetic qualities of buildings, as if they were abstract bodies, but no building is innocent. Its “unconscious” is loaded with political conflicts, hidden human dramas, life stories of the workers who built it, of those who inhabited them … this “unconscious” is what interests me and what I try to rescue in my projects, like, for example, in the project Rakenjan Käsi (The Workers Hand) that I made in Helsinki. Instead of focusing my research on the building Kulttuuritalo (The House of Culture, 1952), designed by Alvar Aalto, all my interest was focused on recovering the voice and memory of the volunteer workers who gave generously and free of charge more than 500,000 hours of their lives to the realization of the project. My project raises the question of why the fundamental contribution of these volunteers has been forgotten by official accounts.

AAG:
How do you see your role today as an artist in relation to the “conversations” with icons of architecture and/or modernist projects you have embarked on?

D:
I have worked around the architectural paradigms of modernity, with a critical reading of symbolic constructions by Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, or Le Corbusier in an attempt to identify architecture as the “political unconscious” of modernity. As Walter Benjamin already detected, the architects’ projects would constitute the best incarnation of all those dreams of an impotent modernity to fulfill its promises of emancipation and welfare for all. Ironically, contradictions between the ideological program and political reality become more evident in social housing projects.

I work with the concept of history established by Walter Benjamin, where reviewing history only makes sense if it is a political combat tool of the present. I am interested in studying what has happened to these projects to resituate them in the present, so that they can be discussed, provide complexity, layers of meaning, so that together we can imagine and reimagine alternatives.

AAG:
Your research visit to Manila last July 2018 was quite brief, but you were able to explore and develop a new project. Were there any new insights you gained about the Philippines or Manila during this 10-day visit? Can you tell us more about the new project you are working on for the Ateneo Art Gallery exhibition?

D:
Yes, my first visit to Manila and my first contact with the context of the Philippines was quite brief but intense. I must admit that my prior knowledge was very poor. The Filipino context seems really interesting and complex, with many layers of meanings that coexist in the same spatial-temporal context.

I am shocked by how ignorant we, the inhabitants of Spain, are about our colonial past, its consequences and the responsibilities that derive from it. Despite the fact that the last decolonization process of North African territories took place in the 70s, there has not yet been an important debate in public opinion. Only recently have we begun to review and question some of the important figures of the last colonial period in America (Cuba and Puerto Rico) and Asia (Philippines), such as Antonio López y López, the Marquis of Comillas, a businessman with very good relations with political power and the monarchy, the founder—of among other large companies—of the General Company of Tobaccos of the Philippines, who began his fortune by dedicating himself to the slave trade in Cuba. For example, the great fortunes of the Barcelona bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century and the industrial wealth of Catalonia are based on slavery and the exploitation of the natural resources of the colonized territories.

In my work, I have been interested in how, beyond the territorial occupation and the plundering of natural wealth and bodies, the colonizer also “colonizes” the cultural images of the colonized, appropriating their referents, acculturizing the population, and building an exoticizing story, where the colonized is presented as a “savage” who needs the “civilizing” intervention of the colonizer through his educational, ideological, and military apparatus.

Being from a place that no longer exists and even being born and dying in a place that no longer exists. Being from a place which, according to official maps of the State of Israel, never existed. They keep the keys to the houses, but they are keys that no longer open any door.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are trapped in limbo¹ This limbo has different names such as Arrub, Kalandia, Camp No. 1, Balata, Shu’fat, or Far’a on the West Bank; Jabalia, Rafah, or Beach in the Gaza Strip or the infamous Shatila in Lebanon… and one sole status: Refugee camps under the administration of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief Work Agency)². This limbo is shaped like a labyrinth in which the refugees are born, live and die trapped in this labyrinth. They have been there for about 60 years and are unable to find the way out.

Living in a refugee camp is the closest thing to living in a permanent No Place, a space suspended in a suspended time, designed and constructed to give temporary shelter to the displaced, with a defined and non-expandable perimeter, and in the early days they were tent camps designed for a short time, for a few months, maybe a few years.

Palestinian refugees lived ten or twelve years in these tents waiting to return to their homes, but this return never arrived, and gradually these tents were replaced by small self-built homes, no one designed a development plan, no one drew any squares or streets, and there are only narrow, dark passageways between them, narrow defiles where one must walk in a single line; and the years kept passing, twenty, thirty, forty… and the population increased but the perimeter of the camp did not, and the houses had to expand by adding more rooms, and these began to grow in height, with new buildings being added on roofs and soon others appeared above them.

Human beings who have become the hostages of history live, are born and die in a transit area. Like a science fiction film they live in a parallel reality. When a child is born in Shu’fat refugee camp (on the outskirts of East Jerusalem), a strange phenomenon occurs: they are not really born there, but are born in Beit Natif, or in Lifta, although for the last 60 years Lifta has simply been a pile of rubble on the outskirts of West Jerusalem. When you ask a girl in Balata camp where she is from, she will tell you without a second’s hesitation that she is from Ras Al al-Ayin or Al-Shaykh Muwannis, although if you search for these villages on a map, you’ll never find them.

A woman who has been a refugee in Balata camp for over fifty years, describes in great detail the family home in Jammasin Al Garbiye while showing us dozens of documents proving ownership; she says: “in front of the house was a big tree… and it’s still there!”. There, -now on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, there is nothing, no house or tree, only puddles and cranes and a few metres away two skyscrapers under construction designed by Philippe Stark.

Drinking coffee with a dead man
In the Palestinian refugee camp of Far’a on the West Bank, we were having coffee with a dead man “I’m dead, I’ve been dead for 60 years. If someone takes away your land, they take away your dignity, and a person without dignity is a dead person” he told us at the end of the conversation. We were there to videotape their memories³; for a couple of hours he and his wife had told us where and how they lived before 1948, before disaster befell, the Nakba⁴. They remembered everything: the house, the river, the cultivated fields, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants… and how they were forced to leave, and when they soon reached Far’a where they lived ten years in a tent, then in a shack -now it looks something like a home- and 60 years have passed, 60 years waiting to return to cultivated fields near the river where tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants grew… “the only option is to return!” he insisted again and again. A few days later we went there: there were no cultivated fields or tomatoes or eggplants; the river was there however flanked by a pleasant urban park, the Yarkon Park, which crosses from east to west, north of Tel Aviv, it was Saturday and dozens of carefree citizens were practising sports, strolling or playing with their children without realizing the presence of their neighbours: the dead man who was drinking coffee and his wife who, despite not moving from the Far’a refugee camp in 60 years, have never stopped growing tomatoes and eggplants in this place.

Jerusalem, 2007

Annotations:

(1) Limbo: according to Catholic theology, limbo is a state, or a place on the edge of hell, where those who committed no sin themselves would bear the guilt of original sin.

(2) According to the latest census there are 4,448,430 Palestinian refugees scattered among the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Approximately one-third (1,300,000) live in 58 refugee camps managed by UNRWA.

(3) 48_nakba: Video, 22’. Israel / Palestine 2007. Images, script and direction: Domènec and Sàgar Malé. Participants: Refugees in Ramallah and the refugee camps of Al Fara’a and Balata. A documentary film by Mapasonor

(4) The Palestinians use the word Nakba, which in Arabic literally means “catastrophe” to describe the war following the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948 and which resulted in the pillaging and forced exile of some 750,000 Palestinians, hundreds of villages being demolished and their names eliminated from maps. Since 1998 Palestinians have “celebrated” the day of the Nakba on May 15, the same day the Israelis celebrate the day of the declaration of independence of the State of Israel.

The Phantoms of the City

Teresa Grandas

Text for the book  “The Stadium, the Pavilion and the Palace. Domènec, An Intervention at the Barcelona Pavilion”, edited by Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2023.

At MACBA in 2018, we presented the Domènec exhibition Ni aquí ni enlloc (Not Here, Not Anywhere), a survey of almost twenty years of the artist’s oeuvre featuring a number of his works and new

projects. At the same time, Domènec mounted an intervention at the Barcelona Pavilion linked to the exhibition at MACBA by means of the publication of a journal available in both venues. L’estadi, el pavelló i el palau (The Stadium, the Pavilion and the Palace) took its title from an article by Josep Maria Huertas Claveria, published in Destino magazine on 10 December 1966, that considered some of the iconic buildings erected on Montjuïc mountain for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. These edifices, part of the letter of introduction presented by a prosperous, modern, open and Cosmopolitan city to the world, concealed from view a pell-mell of overcrowded ramshackle dwellings on the far side of the mountain looking out to sea. These shanties, right next to the vast cemetery on Montjuïc, were home to the labourers, and their families, who had built this new city. This situation arose at the close of the 1920s and, far from being remedied over the following years, this ‘offstage’ area of the ‘official’ mountain gradually took shape as the permanent temporary place where workers from elsewhere would settle when they arrived in Barcelona in search of a better life.

Huertas Claveria’s article focused on the families living in the shacks on the city’s Somorrostro Beach, which were washed away by a storm in the autumn of 1963, as a result of which the residents were temporarily moved to the stadium on Montju.c, then not in use, while waiting to be rehoused. These people joined previous occupations of other buildings, also standing idle, from the earlier 1929 International Exposition, such as the Palau de les Missions (Palace of the Missions) workhouse and the Belgian Pavilion. This supposedly short-lived wait for something better went on for some time for almost 500 families, who turned these edifices into their homes for a number of years, transforming them into what Huertas Claveria called ‘ghostly shanty dwellers’, hidden behind the faded splendour of the buildings that had formerly been the public face of Barcelona.

Unfortunately, this was not an unusual occurrence but was far more common and went on for much longer than desirable. One paradigmatic case, still ongoing today, arose in a number of major cities in Brazil at the end of the military campaigns of the War of Canudos (1896-1897), when returning soldiers, who had been promised a salary that would enable them to acquire a home as a reward for their efforts on behalf of the country, settled as an interim solution in precarious buildings erected on hill and mountainsides. As the years and generations of inhabitants passed, these initially temporary favelas grew into large neighbourhoods on the fringes of Rio de Janeiro. The once temporary tenants became the new occupants.

Domènec’s work reflects on the idea of dwelling; on the conditions that architecture proposes and imposes; on the housing options put forward by modern architecture and on the utopias, realities and failures that derive from them; on the confrontation between projects; and the fracture driven by social, economic and political circumstances. One example of the artist’s work that addresses these issues in-depth is the documentary 48_Nakba, made in collaboration with Mapasonor, in which Domènec provides an opportunity for five Palestinian men and women to appear one after another before the camera and show the deeds of ownership to their homes and the keys that open their front doors; they also detail memories of their homes and villages; and at the end of each interview they hold up a poster bearing the name of their village. They describe how they were driven from their lands in 1948 and moved to temporary refugee camps: a political exodus triggered by a UN resolution to divide the land of Palestine and to create the new state of Israel; an exodus of more than a million people forced to leave and relocate to refugee camps set up as temporary settlements but where still today more than three generations of Palestinians remain, waiting for the constitution of their country or the restitution of their homes that were razed to the ground shortly after their departure. The elderly still dream of being able to return to their homes. At the end of each interview, however, the camera takes us to the places where these homes and villages once stood before they were demolished and wiped off the map. In this work, Domènec draws a now imaginary map of impossible desires on top of old realities. The clash between a past that will not be repeated and an abysmal present that no-one wants to acknowledge. A dwelling today amid conflicting longings and materialities, in which the clash is founded precisely on the false notion of the temporary, which is, perhaps, the only thing that makes it possible to still look ahead to the future.

These long-term settlements set up in response to particular circumstances, the appropriation of the space to legitimise the possibility of existence, are one aspect of the approach to architecture and the housing project of modern times, and part of a broader reflection, as remarked earlier. Domènec’s work moves back and forth in those places where desire and longings clash with diametrically opposed realities; something like a game between fiction and reality in which the fiction is based on legitimacy, but on the impossibility of being; and where reality is revealed in all its perversity.

The projects in question focus on housing in relation to geopolitical or representational strategies. In the case of Barcelona, the presentation of the growth of a city and its future prospects, even at the expense of its builders and the inhabitants of the other city, the ghost city. A two-fold phantasmagoria emerges. Firstly, in the non-place of the home waiting to exist and of the configuration of the provisional space itself. The spur-of-the-moment resolutions to what at a given moment is a specific problem but which then goes on to become entrenched long term. And secondly, the dissimulation, the hidden yet latent city. Who constructed those buildings? Who erected the city and its new streets? What was the labour force which, with its toil, made the modern city ‘shine’ before the world? The phantom limb and ‘the eternal habit of hiding unpleasant things, as if just showing the best things would make Barcelona a better city’, as Huertas Claveria puts it.

It is perhaps worth stopping to consider what it was that alerted Huertas Claveria to the situation and prompted him to write his article: the opportunity for the Real Club Deportivo Español to move to Montjuïc Stadium, a move pushed for by the football club’s chairman at the time, Juan Vilà Reyes, regarded by the Franco regime as a model businessman. This move meant that the stadium had to be remodelled to meet the new needs and to equip it with all the services required by a modern sports club. However, the move was thwarted by the temporary – temporary, of course! – move into the stadium of the people from Somorrostro affected by the storm in 1963. ‘Temporariness’. A word which, according to Huertas Claveria, ‘should be banned from the official language of our country’. Just ours? Since it compelled acknowledgement of the hidden, disguised occupation of the building by people who lived in it in deplorable conditions. Interestingly, Vil. Reyes played a prominent part in one of the biggest financial scandals of the Franco era, one in which numerous ministers and senior officials of the regime’s government were embroiled but from which they pretty well all emerged legally unscathed, with only the businessman sent to gaol, though on lenient terms bearing in mind the times.

What Domènec proposed in his intervention was to strip 15 the Barcelona Pavilion of its luxury attributes, such as its chairs and curtains, and to replace them with Formica dining chairs and with sheets and towels hung on lines, thereby suggesting the residential occupation of a mountain that presented itself to the world as a showcase of modernity, but whose bowels concealed the reality in which that city changed its name. The vision of a city that has broken the rules of self-respect and has descended into darkness and poverty. That Biutiful Barcelona of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film that never affords a single glimpse of the archetypal sites of the official tourist city, but which plunges into the deepest bowels, to the other side of the city that is never shown but nonetheless exists.

Perhaps the key is the need to hide, to mask these realities. While families crowded into shacks on the other side of the mountain, in the German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, King Alfonso XIII shared a cold collation with the German dignitaries before continuing on his royal tour to open the event. One of the gems of modern architecture provided a sumptuous stage for the representation of power. On the other side, the city was changing its name. Another name which, masked, would endure for decades.

Domènec’s work gravitates around the project related to the communal, around the residential project; the nature of the ideological and social keys that underpin them; and the clash with the real needs of the people who inhabit the place. The conflict between the city as a postcard or letter of introduction, as a tourist attraction, and the home as a dwelling place. The losses resulting from occupants’ moves and their need to survive what should have been seasonally temporary. Huertas Claveria himself extended his reflection to the issue of the state: ‘The state, and it is fitting that we review this concept, is us, and its decisions ought to be the outcome of joint endeavour, not four pen strokes dashed off in an office as impressive as those changing rooms praised by Mr. Vilà Reyes.’ It would take another few years for Barcelona to make those settlements in the Stadium, the Pavilion and the Palace disappear… But let us not forget that even in 2022, many families are evicted for financial reasons and that the right to a home, as set forth in the Spanish Constitution, remains a dream for some. Domènec’s reflection takes us back into the past, but it is a reflection that looks back from the present.

Teresa Grandas
Exhibitions Curator at MACBA

(Text for the solo exhibition at ADN Platform. May 2016)

At the end of the 1970s, when the habitational utopias derived from the Letter of Athens (1942) sink into the metropolitan peripheries worldwide, Roland Barthes dictates the course How To Live Together in the Collège of France¹. According to the author, the communal ideal lies in the idiorhythm, a “regularly interrupted loneliness” that allows small groupings among individuals to stay together in a precarious balance between mutual distances and proximities. This daydream -barely outlined in practice by Mount Athos’ monks- does not enjoy any societal vocation. The ideal of a good life has nothing to do with phalanxes or other communal models. It in fact defines itself through excluding terms, because it is about not being too far away from others.

Roland Barthes’ ideas express an irregularity that cancels the prolific history of a “being together” enlightened by mass utopias. On the one hand, the idiorhythm acknowledges its genealogy in the anchorit tradition and in some of the multiple cult attempts at utopian socialism. On the other, it dissociates itself from another grand narrative, promoted by Modernity, that identifies coexistence as a way of speaking and being together, able to industrially reproduce itself everywhere and for everyone. The origin of this purpose can be found in Engels’ thesis in 1873: to alleviate the housing problem during the first phase of a new socialist society, eviction will be necessary. Also necessary will be the conversion of already-existing houses into commune-houses (domma-komuny) that exorcise the property principle². These communes, however, are only a patch, unable to standardise the habitational solution. The true inflection point happens after the success of the Soviet Revolution, when the Association of Contemporary Architects essays the first collective housing (Kommunalk) through the Narkomfin prototype. The Narkomfin (1928-1932) is a block for approximately 200 people intended to accelerate the transition to socialist life³. The ambition of the project attracts the attention of the modern movement through the CIAM (International Modern Architecture Congress), so that Le Corbusier and the GATCPAC (Catalan Technics and Architects for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture) travel to Moscow to learn about a model that will soon feed new projects such as Casa Bloc (Barcelona, 1932-1936) or the canonic Unité d’Habitation (1947).

The ideal of a communal house, conceived as a multipliable cell that could reproduce the new models of social relations, seems finally accomplished. However, it never fully progresses. On the one hand, the Stalinist swerve in the USSR aborts all of the radical collective experiences and reorients the Narkomfin’s function towards the Nomenklatura senior officials. The same destiny awaits Casa Bloc, where Spanish fascists modify the project for a new function: a military settlement. In its turn, the Unité d’Habitation triumphs as an habitational prototype during the reconstruction of post-war Europe. Nevertheless, it had already become the seed that would soon expand the worldwide suburbial dystopia. The story of social housing will stop relating to communal experiments from that moment onwards. Instead, it reorients itself progressively towards mass credit politics, swelling speculation and property value. The imaginary of the commune, in this context, hardly progresses in the margins of counterculture?. Abandoning its genuine germinal function, it becomes an ingenuous refuge to play against the welfare model.

Barthes’s idiorhytmic ideal -’the antinomy of sharing distances’- feels like a true anachronism and a complete setback; at least given that it doesn’t enjoy any correspondence with neither the historical narrative of the societal commune, nor the subsequent ruins of its mythology. The own rhytmos that Barthes evokes through old lauras athonitas -’small houses, hermitages for two or three people, close to churches, a hospital and a water course’- has nothing to do with the property bond, but it is also unable to found neighbourhoods or become a social body. It is a way of being together reduced to far closeness, and therefore, a weak community of auratic and not as much of historical episode. Barthes himself recognizes the historical impurity lead by nostalgia from the past, alien to the progress of time. The anachronism is recognized, however, under the epigraph of simulation or a miniature. The nuance is crucial.

Barthes also postulates how miniatures should be interpreted: not as mere projections of the future, but as “that which is being experienced”?. Indeed, the “miniature-work” is the best example of a practice in which the text’s materialization (the model is literary) is subject to a test and experienced with himself. The miniature is not only an enunciation that is yet to come. The work-miniature does not advance in a dream, but it literally essays it: it is not a promise of becoming but an actual fulfillment. This is why Barthes focuses on simulacres instead of anachronisms. Anachronisms presuppose a lack of correspondence between a narrative and the moment that this narrative is born. The simulation, the miniature, does not have this problem since they always happen, they always ‘are’.

The miniatures of Narkomfin, Casa Bloc and Unité d’Habitation are, in the first place, miniatures of miniatures. They are reconstructions of barely fulfilled old promises. History hardly gave them the chance of becoming something more than a mild simulation. Their reapparition operates as a sort of new chance, a renewed mise en scène of the original intentions lying underneath and inside of them. Clearly, by installing the miniatures in an uncomfortable context -in a natural environment or in precarious balance on domestic furniture-, a shadow is projected. This shadow questions and darkens modern idealist pretensions. But this obvious remark is not a fundamental question. If we interpret them through a Barthesian lens, these miniatures propose the imperative of their actualization. They don’t close habitational utopias: they show us the need for experimenting with coexistence. Again.

————————-
¹ Roland Barthes, Cómo vivir juntos. Simulaciones novelescas de algunos espacios cotidianos. Notas de cursos y seminarios en el Collège de France, 1976-1977. Siglo XXI Ed. Buenos Aires, 2003.
² Frederich Engels. Contribución al problema de la vivienda. Fundación de Estudios Socialistas Federico Engels. Madrid, 2006.
³ Moisei Ginzburg. Escritos: 1923-1930. El Croquis. Madrid, 2007.
?Keith Melville. Las comunas en la contracultura. Kairós. Barcelona, 1980.
? Roland Barthes. La preparación de la novela. Notas de cursos y seminarios en el Cóllege de France 1978-1979 y 1979-1980. Siglo XXI ed. México, 2005. p. 233.

(Español)

“[…]A curvy wall, not a straight one, should be built.”

Flavio Vegecio Renato, Compendio de técnica militar, segles IV-V

“[…] since the social world is wholly present in each ‘economic’ action, we must resort to instruments of knowledge which, far from questioning the multidimensionality and multifunctionality of practices, enable us to draw up historical models capable of rigorously, minutely explaining the actions and the economic institutions as they are offered to empirical observation. […]”

Pierre Bourdieu, Las estructuras sociales de la economía

“[…] Our blood is outside the law, it can be spilled, we can be killed, massacred, with total impunity.

Yitskhok Katzenelson, Le chant du peuple juif assassiné

“[…] Shadowy shall be the night… scarce the roses.”

Mahmud Darwish, Menos rosas

1. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was created, something very significant has been happening in Palestine which stretches beyond this plot of land and has gradually taken on the air of a transcendental dispute, at least in the Western world. The clash between the antagonists is extremely harsh, and there is increasingly little room for dialogue. Even compassion, if it has ever been present, has wholly disappeared. In this sense, the latest large-scale deployments in Tsahal (regular Israeli army) in both Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and in the Gaza Strip in early 2009 confirm the prevalence of a bellicose logic that makes it very difficult to reach even minimal peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians. The coexistence of these two peoples seems to be eternally condemned to roaring failure. In fact, it is actually an ancient enmity almost a century old whose point of departure was Zionist nationalism’s desire for a return to the hypothetical lost fatherland: the biblical Israel of the Old Testament. When Zionism began to talk about an unpeopled land for a landless people is when the conflicts, of course, began to break out.

As is common knowledge, despite its low population density in the 1940s, Palestine was not exactly an unpeopled land. Under the domain of the British Empire, the Palestinians, most of them Muslim Arabs, already had problems sharing with increasingly numerous groups of Jews from all over the world the scarce, exiguous resources of a place with highly limited productivity. The tone of this conflict grounded in the prevailing scarcity rose after World War II, especially due to the consequences of one of the most horrific episodes associated with war devastation: the Shoah or destruction of the Jewish people in Europe. After having taken such a beating, the Jewish people only had a more zealous desire to tread on that supposed Promised Land. The symbolic charge rose exponentially as the mythical place also effectively became the host to thousands of survivors of the anti-Semitic genocide policy conducted by Nazism. Despite the fact that quantitatively the most significant number of immigrants were Jews from the Near East and North Africa, the arrival of boats overflowing with Jews recently released from the extermination camps and the ghettos scattered around Eastern Europe had – because of the emotional effect prompted by the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis – a foundational meaning. Indeed, in 1948 the state of Israel was born. However, the edification of this new political, administrative and also military entity did not materialise fluidly and peacefully in an unpeopled land, as the more doctrinaire Zionist propaganda heralded it, rather the entire process became yet another story of violence.

Still, the victorious international community consented and even actively contributed to this, especially the United States, when it attached the existence of Israel to its geopolitical interests. Ultimately – and some scholars of the Palestinian plight like Norman G. Finkelstein make well-founded mentions of this – both in the period between the wars and during and after World War II, the use of methods such forcibly displacing people to resolve ethnic conflicts was habitual, and not exactly the subject of condemnation. Despite that apparent, consented normality, what happened was unquestionably a terrible chapter of pain, uprooting and exile that affected a considerable proportion of the local Palestinian population. It was the year of the Nabka (misfortune or catastrophe) as the Palestinians justifiably call it. And in the end, not even all the suffering of the Jews in Europe has managed to offset the trauma caused by the founding of the state of Israel. Some revisionist Israeli historians such as Ilan Pappé have dismantled the founding myth and turned it upside down using solid arguments. The new studies link the newly-found Israeli nationality – apart from the mythological re-creation of a lost past that is present in all the processes of nation-building – to dishonourable episodes of violations of fundamental human rights, and even abominable ones like ethnic cleansing.

2. Therefore, we should consider that the founding of the state of Israel was not only induced by the suffering of Nazi persecution, but that it was a factor that precipitated it and somehow legitimised it. This is true to such an extent that engendering further suffering on the people that had lived and worked in that corner of the Near East for centuries did not initially pose any moral impediment to the Zionist enterprise. In the history of modern Israel, it is very meaningful – because of its controversy and the repercussions linked to it – that the victims – surely the victims par excellence of the 20^th century – have engendered other perennial victims that delegitimize the viability of the state and place it in a constant state of war and mobilisation. From this accumulation of historical circumstances, a state organisation has emerged with certain peculiarities that situate it in the avant-garde, based among other things on the treatment, invention and forging of collective memories and particularly on global capitalism’s latest forms of management and production. Israel is a radical paradox. As historian Régine Robin has pointed out, it is a fragmented, ethnicised, communalised society which at the same time is modern, linked to the development of high technology and the most advanced media, Americanised, globalised like all Western societies. Surely Israel is a privileged place to capture that post-modern ethos where the most rampant modernisation, combined with the most deregulated capitalism, coexists alongside identity and religious elements ruled by unbridled atavism.

As Régine Robin has noted, blindness has prevailed in Israel for some years now. In fact, what reigns in a kind of sentimental and visual indifference that makes it difficult to perceive the Palestinians and their history. Everything has led – and has been accentuated in recent months as bombs have rained down from the skies to the depressed land of Gaza – to a wholly oppressive policy that involves, using the exact words of the author herself, […] transformation of the landscape, destruction of the ancient cities and towns, reconstruction of the towns and creation of other settlements; everything falls within a different symbolic organisation of space, a radical transformation of the toponymy, a straightening of the modern motorways that have nothing to do with the ancient roadways. The goal is to re-create the country, to re-constitute the geography, to re-design the landscape, to ensure not only physical but also symbolic domination. And based on this, later on, the new colonies and settlements, the detours in the networks of conduits and irrigation, the beltways, and the web of territory and the ‘Bantustanisation’ of the occupied territories. […] This is unquestionably a highly accurate description of the climate in which Israeli nationalism has unfolded for a long period of time. According to another historian, Mark Mazower, spatial planning has always played a prime role, plus this nationalism has had inspirational sources whose referent was the German school of economic geography from the between-war period. This is not strange if we bear in mind – as already mentioned – that the belief in the ethnically pure nation-state as a solution to the distribution of the population and resources was the currency of exchange in the cartographic redesigns after the war and in many processes of decolonisation. Therefore, in this sense we could say that the architects of the new state of Israel were not at all singular in using criteria – debatable and human, as demonstrated – already used by many other peoples. Nonetheless, there was one difference: the creation of Israel was a classic act of colonisation at a time when the empires were disintegrating. Given this, it could only have led to conflict, the victims’ tenacious resistance and the weakness of the democratic system.

As a result, this state that is vainglorious about being the only state in the Middle East where a parliamentary system comparable to any other Western country is actually a curious form of democracy. In reality, just like many other issues, Israel is on the cutting edge in terms of a conception of democracy that is increasingly fashionable and characterised by restricting democratic participation, by enshrining individualism and by the pre-eminent role of the elites. Political scientist Sheldon S. Wolin has described it quite accurately using the terminology ‘managed democracy’ and the development of the notion of inverted totalitarianism, which means a connivance between the state organisation, the active, politicised participation of the large corporations and the acritical political passivity of the majority of citizens. In Israel, this phenomenon is largely visible, but with a difference worth highlighting: the degree of military mobilisation which is required by a people drilled based on the cultivation of a culture of fear and external threat. In short, from its very origins it has been a nation at arms against real and potential enemies – the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran and others depending on the point in history – which might endanger its territorial integrity and the survival of its identity.

This situation of constant alert has placed Israel among the ranks of the pioneering countries in the generation of security technologies and action protocols to handle both low-intensity conflicts and open warfare. This technological progress has gained unexpected momentum since 9/11, which, as is common knowledge, ushered in the age of the war against global terrorism. Through America’s unbridled, militarised policy, Israel has amply confirmed its status as a “security” laboratory and testing grounds for the garrison society, as French sociologist Armand Mattelart calls it. As a perfect illustration of this “security” practice, the author himself spotlights the 29-metre tall concrete security fence with electronic alarms, reinforced by trenches and barbed wire in some places, which is expected to run 700 kilometres long, as long as the West Bank’s “green line”, which marks the boundary set in 1967 during the Six-Day War. Yet things are even more serious because as we speak, the construction of the wall now arbitrarily invades the line set as a result of this conflict. The Israeli administration is consciously carrying out an aggressive territorial policy of deeds consummated with the excuse of protecting the Jewish colonies that are located inside the Palestinian occupied territories. With the sophisticated surveillance defences and networks surrounding them, these clusters of homes contribute to illegally expanding Israeli land and reducing the Palestinians’ living space. It is a way of acting that takes into account the perspective of a future partition of Palestine into two states. In this way, Israel, with part of its job already done, would keep the best part of the pie.

As pointed out, one of the priorities of whomever holds the political power in Israel, at least until now, is stressing its modern, Western personality, which means publicising its democratic credentials and public policies, which somehow conceals the chilling scene that is wreaking havoc on Palestinian territory and its displaced inhabitants, as well as those confined to residual areas without no rights whatsoever. These wastelands where the Palestinian people are suffering are a stumbling block that still needing resolution on the planning agenda of a territorial restructuring that Israeli authorities deem unfinished. In fact, the masking manoeuvres in which culture plays an active role are quite inherent to the capitalist West, especially since the 1980s when the large private corporations and the state, in a subsidiary role, forged a close relationship, a link that merges corporate sponsorship with public policy. As a result, according to researcher Chin-tao Wu, this unit connected the arts and culture with the spirit of the free market so highly prized in the Reagan and Thatcher decade. However, not only did it entail this meaningful mutation, rather it also involved, based on the modus operandi in the sacrosanct market, art playing the role of identity-merchandiser and consensus-reacher. Despite this, it should be pointed out that at times, in institutional art policies – both public and private – ambivalence arises that open up avenues where antagonistic discourses with little sympathy for the powers-that-be may circulate.

In such an unedifying juncture as Israel, from the moral standpoint, therefore, it should come as no surprise that cultural and artistic exchanges with other states are promoted, states that in theory are exemplary in relation to the defining parameters of what is considered to be a democracy. In this sense, conducting artistic exchanges could be viewed as a sign of normality, and it was largely based on this pathway that Domènec made his first journey to Israel in 2006. However, as mentioned, there are also cracks within the institution that enable some artists, managers and curators to work from a somewhat critical standpoint and desire for subversion. As can be clearly seen in these projects, Domènec and his Israeli hosts exploited this crack. Likewise, if we bear in mind his career in the past 15 years, it is not surprising that he ended up in Israel.

What stands out with this artist is his work revolving around the crisis in the modern project and the post-modern mutations that have taken place since the last third of the 20^th century. Domènec accomplishes this artistic choice through an increasingly expanded conception of sculpture, with the use of technical devices and diversified presentations in which proto-architectural recycling and the para-documentary process play a predominant role. Therefore, we could state that, by using architecture as a means of approaching metonymics, Domènec has confected a veritable survey of the utopian pretensions of modernity. In this way, situating himself in the terrain of critical post-modernism – which he distinguishes from that lame statement that does nothing other than apologetically intone the undoing of radical humanism and the social propositions that defend equality – he choose to adopt a rebel commitment which, although it questions the limitations of modernity, insists on showing that the inherited order is more the expression of a shipwreck than the rendering of a positive solution to something that is exhausted. In short, his critical position has led him to inquire into the marrow of the potential modern utopia in order to reinterpret and resituate it. That is, his goal is to give it back meaning in the midst of the systemic, fragmented chaos that surrounds it. He has mainly conducted this operation, as mentioned, by exploring the transformational potential and the utopian imagination of modern architecture. In the past, reinterpreted projects by architects like Alvar Aalto, Le Corbussier and Mies van der Rohe, just to name three, have served the artist to bring to light in a very productive, educational way the deficiencies, paradoxes and desires to change contained in polyhedral modern thinking. In this way, his reinterpretations, which are objectually captured in scale models often decontextualised from their original setting and purpose, become the mirrors of a kind of modernity in crisis and of post-modern disorientation, plus after a process of stripping away any pretensions at grandiloquence, they re-launch the utopian modern virtues to apply them in an everyday context.

His journey to Israel, invited to a residence by an Israeli organisation (Jerusalem Center for The Visual Arts) may likely have led him to continue along this avenue of inquiry. In fact, a significant number of architects identified with rationalism ended up building in Israel. Tel Aviv is one of the cities on the planet with the most buildings of this kind. At first, it would not seem contradictory that the place envisioned and so often designated as the Promised Land would end up being the home to a kind of architecture designed to improve humanity’s living conditions, but if we examine the process through which this state was founded, along with its history and current status, the contradiction unfortunately becomes clear. What is more, it is not brazen to state that these paradoxes implicit in modernity take on an unforeseen visibility in each of Israel’s actions in Palestine. Certainly, one of the places on the globe where the humanistic route coupled with the modern discourse has encountered its most striking failure is Israel. For example, we should bear in mind that early on the reality of a Hebrew state had very direct connections with versions of unionism and socialism. Yet, as is known, this did not prevent the forced isolation of many of the Palestinian inhabitants who lived there, and this segregation has not stopped, rather today it is even more accentuated.

Domènec did not remain impassive when confronted with this scene in which the brutalisation of everyday life flourishes. It might have been interesting, but it was not enough for him to just set his scrutinising sights on some emblematic architectural construction. The metonymic speculation about some modern architectural remain amidst so much injustice and barbarism might have taken on the air of a mere formalist exercise, a choice inherent in a kind of inoperative, depoliticised refolding, as Dominique Baqué would say. Domènec, then, saw himself – and kept seeing himself –trapped and enthralled by a living, vibrant universe that exposed the ultimate condition of post-modern policy to plain view. Even further, we could agree with George Arthur Goldshmidt – the journalist cited by Régine Robin in her book on the dynamics of memory in terms of history – that perhaps the very fate of collective Western memory is at stake in this minuscule part of the planet. Without any hesitancy, we must assert that Israel’s warlike, humiliating conduct towards the Palestinian people defames the memory of the Jewish people’s tragedy at the hands of Nazi criminality. As is common knowledge, Auschwitz checkmates the intellectual monument of modernity. But at the same time, the massacres at Sabra or Shatila or the latest bombardments of the depressed Gaza Strip, with all the distinctions and nuances that you will, follow a determination that can only end up feeding the dark universe of barbarism.

Having reached this point, even the arguments used by all those who, from the memory of the Shoah, have made and make the model for erecting a negative criticism of the modern Western way are questioned and lose importance. Obviously, this does not mean that there are no longer reasons to evaluate the modern project with all its latent and visible contradictions – the founding origins of Israel cannot be understood other than in this paradoxical key of modernity – but the real problem arises when that memory of the hurt from the extermination camps becomes an instrument used to justify execrable behaviours. The moral incongruence is lethal, and the victims’ sublimated memory becomes something banal, liturgical and ritual at the service of a cause that consciously ignores the immorality of the means used. The after-effects are a dually outraged modernity and the manipulation of the memory of a crime committed on the Jewish population during the leaden years as a result of the criminal expansion of German imperialism. This episode has left a moving remnant thanks to thousands of witness reports and exceptional literary works such as the long poem written in Yiddish, The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, written by Yitskhok Katzenelson, the spokesman and emblem of the suffering caused by the annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto, who ended up being gassed at Auschwitz. In truth, this is the vast disappointment that overwhelms us as we perceive the testimonial legacy of the Shoah (indisputable humanist cultural edifice) sullied by the often infamous behaviour of the state of Israel. In this sense, and on an individual level, the life story of the Bergen-Belsen camp survivor Hannah Levy-Hass, the mother of the eminent Israeli journalist Amira Hass, is quite meaningful. This woman saw all her worlds collapse: the devastation of the Jewish minority in Europe, the implosion of socialism in her birthplace, Yugoslavia, and finally the huge disappointment of her adopted home, Israel, which whose colonialist character soon reared its head.

For all of these reasons, and without ignoring other aspects already mentioned about the capitalist organisation of production, Israel has this close tie with the condition of post-modernity. Israel-Palestine is therefore a reality and a metaphor of the terrible dead end in which contemporary mankind finds itself. With his trip to the Middle East, Domènec’s artistic oeuvre has undergone a change, but not in the semi-mystical neo-Orientalist sense of reencounter with the deepest essence of his being, rather one that should speak about a re-politicisation of his aesthetic procedures. This transformation, vivid and without signs of having finished, has enabled him to capture the routes through which the political economy and symbolic capital of the latest generation move. As a result, the journey, more accurately, the different sojourns, in Palestine, far from being well-intentioned cultural tourism, have helped him to even further fine-tune his artistic procedure, which has shifted, by shedding light on the deficiencies of modernity, to reveal the dysfunctions of the post-modern period in a specific place.

3. Even though we are living in an age in which the act of travelling has degenerated into a frivolous, consumer activity, it is also true that some people extract fascinating lessons that they then process in creative and knowledge-based acts that may have a public, general interest. The British playwright, David Hare, is one of them. His monologue Via Dolorosa was written after a stay in Israel and the Palestinian territories in 1997. It is a quick, ironic work as confirmed by this excerpt: “There is nothing that prepares you for the physical shock of entering to Gaza. A writer said that to go from Israel to the Gaza Strip by car is like going from California to Bangladesh. You get so used to wide highways and the easy sensuality of Israel that it is the vision of dust, a sudden dust, a giant, brown storm of real filth that warns you that you’re about to enter a society where people earn exactly 8% of what their counterparts in Israel earn. […]” Without a doubt, this impressionistic description clearly shows the drama and deterioration in the disputed Palestine. Without going to Gaza yet developing an intense work halfway between detective work and the situationist drift of the divided city of Jerusalem and the occupied territories on the West Bank, Domènec, in turn, has managed to convey to us the disturbing nature that the Israeli economic and political project has taken on recently. As is common in his oeuvre, with an austere exercise in style surmounted by critical distance and irony, he shapes a dissident portrait whose innovativeness shapes an effective, accessible critique.

In order to examine what he sets out to do – we have already mentioned that this time he is not working around any specific, authorial architectural paradigm – the procedure with which he has deployed his aesthetic re-appropriation has borne in mind three vertexes of Israeli society: security and war, the fact of living associated with an economy with highly singular colonial features, as we shall see, and finally the victims and their memory. It is clear that the expository approach entails a prior disorientation which, however, is transmuted into a brilliant instrument of critical reflection. The vague re-creation of a real estate office, with its hypothetical promotional materials, might seem like a provocation when examining the reality of a society in such upheaval. However, the artist’s incursion into everyday life makes it clear that there is no neutral economic activity; rather that it always responds to the intense presence of the social world, as Pierre Bourdieu stressed.

In the case of Israel-Palestine, given the gravity of the conflict, the very fact of inhabiting and situating oneself in the territory – even though this holds true everywhere – takes on a much stronger political connotation, and even becomes an act of colonialist violence with odious consequences for the vast, disadvantaged Palestinian majority. Domènec presents it ironically in order to get us to grasp it, but real life is much worse. It is cynical, and there is nothing hindering the fact that real estate ads appear in the Israeli press showing homes located inside the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. The sale of these homes is possible, and what is more, is encouraged as yet another tool in Israel’s dominance strategy. However, putting into practice everyday questions like the gradual entrenchment of these settlements of colonisers who view themselves of pioneers in a messianic cause and, furthermore making it viable, requires the assumption of an extreme security-based policy that has catastrophic after-effects in civil society. It is democratic restriction without any stops on it, which unfortunately confers on it an exemplary role. Naomi Klein has expressed what this prominent Israeli role in the global security race consists of in crystal clear terms. About this matter, the Canadian analyst said the following: in South Africa, Russia and New Orleans, the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this process a step further: it builds walls to encircle the dangerous poor. As Naomi Klein states, this is the best exponent of disaster capitalism. In no way it is anti-capitalist rhetoric. For example, quite recently, a project was unveiled in the city of Rio de Janeiro that will consist of erecting a large wall around the impoverished neighbourhoods known as favelas.

This latter definition appealing to disaster fits in perfectly with everything that Domènec captures and shows us through the materials that complement and give meaning to his purported real estate office. First, a fragmented documentary – far from the linearity of television’s visual narrative – expanded into four thematic propositions that reflect the civil and territorial rupture and therefore the impossibility – despite the existence of Jewish leftist activists who seek an alternative route to reconciliation – of instilling a certain degree of social cohesion in view of the inexorable advance of a kind of communitarianism that is grounded on inequality and exploitation. This last word is gradually losing weight because, ever since the arrival of the Jews from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Palestinian population is no longer considered productive, and herein lies the singularity of late Israeli colonialism. Treated as a bothersome residue, they are displaced and locked up in vast prisons, the occupied territories themselves, and their presence becomes the essential pretext – by maintaining a ongoing, low-intensity conflict – for driving a prosperous security industry. Despite the disaster, the economy’s growth rates are vast, comparable, according to Naomi Klein, to those of China and India. The latent state of war is the backbone of Israeli capitalism. Maintaining this climax of tension is expressed, according to Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, in the unstable balance between the suspended everyday violence (that is, the sure yet hidden threat of a hypothetical use of force) and the spectacular violence that the media pay no heed to which is applied in certain situations in which the oppressed people’s resistance is heightened. What is more, thanks to the planet-wide extrapolation of the state of exception promoted recently by the US administration of former President G.W. Bush, the benefits have only risen.

Next is a special edition, a kind of publication inspired by real estate advertising supplements, which Domènec turns into a catalogue that documents and photographically verifies what is in fact a segmented society imprisoned in unscrupulous economic dynamics: Jewish settlements in the Arab and Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, the Wall of Shame being built, demolished Palestinian houses, refugee camps, Jewish colonies in the occupied territories, bothersome checkpoints, the remains of old Palestinian towns dating from before 1948. In short, the strident declaration that the prevailing sectors in Israel have chosen the route of a futuristic fortress that views itself as capable of ensuring its survival and primacy despite being surrounded by enemies and chaos, and the indignant humiliation that it causes. Suffering is the business: surveillance technologies, security companies, more privatisation and restrictions in social services, the weapons industry and the construction of a sinuous, undulating wall that is ready to shape – and offensively penetrate when it needs to – the territory of the population considered left over and unproductive.

4. A song by composer Kurt Weill mentions a supposed utopia, called Youkali, which is supposed to be a haven of happiness and pleasure, the country of our fondest wishes that fades away when we realise that it has only been a dream, a fleeting folly. In Israel, the madness is not fleeting; it is chronic and negative, plus it aims to achieve a degenerate utopia which could well be embodied in the enigmatic name of Baladia. In the middle of the Negev Desert, Tsahal and the United States army are experimenting with counterinsurgency fighting techniques in the streets and homes of a simulated city, Baladia, which is a precise replica of a Palestinian town. This is the workshop, the incubator of companies from the security age. Unfortunately, Israel-Palestine is heading towards extreme polarisation: first the city-citadel, and secondly the proliferation of gigantic segregationist ghettos in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Lebanese writer Elias Khoury drove it home when he wrote that the Israeli politicians in charge of confinement via military force are not only forgetting the history of their own people’s oppression rather they seem to have actually decided to identify with their murderers and make the Palestinians become the Jews’ Jews. This play on words is not exactly a diversion; rather it is a bloody reality which Domènec has examined with Sàgar Malé in a sober, convincing way in the stills of the videographic work 48_Nakba. Indeed, five interviews with Palestinians who have lived in squalor in refugee camps inside their own country – what a paradox to be exiled in one’s own home – reflect the marginalisation of an entire people and the attempt to annihilate their culture and identity, a form of destruction that is conducted on a daily basis by executing a systematic plan whose goal is to erase all referents that might give the hope of maintaining in the present ties to the lost recent past. However, there is more than that, as there is evidence of aggression and physical mutations on the Palestinian geography through a process of dispossessing the resources whose only destination is capitalist accumulation. This is a sort of spatial reorganisation, using the terminology of geographer David Harvey, which is materialised under neo-conservative political guidelines targeted at imposing a territorial logic of order and control, and under the economic impetus driven by the liberal privatisation of a place where there is not an abundance of resources. Water, for example, is an explicit case of this. All in all, it offers the security-military complex vast opportunities, and it is legitimised with the mask sculpted by the discourse revolving around combat against purported Palestinian terrorism – whose actions at time also entail a violation of fundamental human rights – otherwise already included in the global catalogue of the Axis of Evil.

One could say that the incursion into Israel-Palestine signalled the addition of a variation in Domènec’s artistic oeuvre. That is, the fact of resizing the rationalistic architectural political and philosophical paradigm by subjecting it to a strategy of dismantlement as a way of accessing a stripped-down analysis of the insufficiencies of modernity is joined by an attitude more commonly found in an agitator – which does not mean that it is any less complex or reflexive. This gesture becomes clear in the prominent role granted to human relations and in the establishment of connections with the social and political milieu that does not accept a present tainted with opprobrium and oppression. Domènec’s foray – somewhere between urbanistic investigation, sociology and cultural anthropology – has not gone in the direction of constituting artificial forms of social life as in the majority of propositions from relational aesthetics; rather its purpose is to documentarily show us the vestiges of an archaeology of what might be a widespread future, with fear and violence as the underpinnings of the social order. Israel-Palestine is a very credible example of the obscurity that our future might embrace, and at the same time this binomial has already taken on tragic proportions deriving from the lament for the perversity that the human condition can harbour within it. That is, the unease that seeps out from the fact, as Eva Figes pointed out in her novel-essay, that the victimism of the Jewish population may justify acts that produce more victims. What should have been a moral referent for humanity, the Holocaust, runs the risk of losing its dignity and becoming a mere propaganda tool in the falcon-like talons of the state of Israel.

With regard to the situation in the United States, which, we should recall, often acts as both a sounding board and a pole of influence on official Israeli stances, historian Peter Novick has warned about these simplifying banalisations which, in his opinion, are closely related to the closing of the ranks of the Jews in the United States and the fact that they have gradually drifted to the right in politics. This has led them to adulterate and distort the cultural weight of the tragedy linked to the Nazi death camps. Without a doubt, the recent Israeli governments’ policies towards the Palestinians put up further hurdles to the possibility of keeping this humanist reference universal. The combination of racial identity and religion with state-of-the-art technologies makes Israel the breeding grounds par excellence of the post-modern ethos. Nonetheless, in accordance with everything said until now, within post-modernity there is also room for critical dissidence and resistance, even in the Palestinian places where roses no longer abound, as Mahmud Darwish’s verse says. Domènec already travelled along this pathway of resistance some time ago, and for this reason it is no coincidence that his aesthetic, so appropriate for these times of urgency, has operated in Israel-Palestine.

In short, to conclude I would only like to add that despite the fact that some authors continue to stress it – especially within the Jewish cultural world itself – it no longer makes much sense to calibrate whether or not founding the state of Israel in Palestine in 1948 is relevant. The reality of the present imposes itself, and therefore the most important objective is to make that plot of land inhabitable for both peoples. The difficulties are vast, perhaps insurmountable, but the only way is a deepening of democracy coupled with a transformation in the socioeconomic model – which, on the other hand, is only possible it if takes place in parallel on the global scale – and the complicity of the pacifist and more progressive sectors on both sides. A continuation of the option of force will lead to a cataclysm. Have the powers-that-be in Israel thought about – as Peggy Anderson suggests – what might happen if the Arab countries in the Near East shake off the American neo-imperialist domination one day? It is likely that Palestinian captivity would cease to exist as we know it today. At the same time, it is virtually certain that the opportunity to redefine a country with room for democracy and secularism would have been squandered. As is palpable every day, Israel’s radical nationalist and extremely neo-conservative social actions are the best fuel for their most fundamentalist, reactionary adversaries. In the end, the fact that the state of Israel is determined to forge ahead with the security paradigm and disaster capitalism cannot be anything but an evil omen. It is the most transparent expression of the very fragility to which it is exposed.

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