Israel/Palestine 2006-2007

Curator: Nirith Nelson

Wooden structure with sign, printed material and four DVDs.
Publication: Real Estate.
Free printed material, unlimited copies, 20 pages. Black and white, 23.5 x 33.2 cm.
4 DVD: Real Estate #1. 23’41’’, Real Estate #2. 8’01’’, Real Estate #3. 10’37’’, Real Estate #4. 5’45’.
Tel Aviv Artists’ Studio, Tel Aviv, May 2007 and La Capella, Barcelona, September 2007. Espai Zero1, Museu de la Garrotxa, Olot, December 2008. Produced by JCVA and ICUB.

Real Estate is the result of a long process of delving into the Israeli/Palestinian problem and began in late 2006 following an invitation from the Jerusalem Center for the Visual Arts (JCVA) to carry out a period of residency in Jerusalem and was continued in subsequent visits in 2006 and 2007. The Real Estate installation is presented as a pretend real estate sales office which offers a series of materials (photographs, videos, interviews, free printed material…) which attempt to be visual proof of the complex, problematic relationship within the territory and housing in this context and to show how architecture and urban planning are part of a war strategy staged by the state of Israel within the context of Palestine occupation and these in fact these become one of the most effective systems of domination. An advertising supplement for “Real Estate” can usually be found in Friday’s editions of the country’s newspapers. In these colourful supplements it is quite common to find advertisements for affordable apartments and suburban houses; it is often only after reading the small print that one notices that these houses lie within the Occupied Palestine Territories and are in fact illegal buildings according to international treaties. This project’s ironic use of the title Real Estate aims to highlight the colonial relationship of “property” which the State of Israel and part of Israeli society holds regarding the Occupied Palestine Territories.

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Baltimore, West Cork, Ireland
March–September 2005

Intervention on the ferries that connect Baltimore fishing port with two of the many islands that make up the profile of south-eastern coast of Ireland and wich are used everyday by their inhabitants to go to work. Thousands and thousands of emigrants left the ports of this region heading for America during the famines of 1846-1848. Construction and placement of two signs on the roof of the two ferries with the words Here and Nowhere. Moving text writtten on the landscape.

see video:

https://youtu.be/u0ZAU3iMnNw

Marseille, 2005
Curator: Martí Peran

Modified Remote Controlled Truck (160 x 64 x 19 cm), The trailer has been substituted for a scale model of the Unité d’Habitation of Marseille (building designed by Le Corbussier in 1947).

Video projection (DVD, 10′ loop), 2005.

Intervention in the interior of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, February 25, 2005. Video recording of the remote-control unit circulating freely in the corridors, elevators and roof of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille.

Video cameraman: Laurent Malone
Video editing: Rafa Ruiz

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The video has been exhibited at places such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Rotterdam Architecture Film Festival and at the Vladivostok Film Festival.

*The piece belongs to the Museo de Teruel.

Photo series, Roma, 2004

Photo Series (11 photos 45 x 60 cm)

The Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, built by Le Corbusier in the 1940’s represents the beginning of a series of architectural projects concerning social housing with clear Utopian inspirations and a radical attempt to transform the common ways of life. We can state that Corviale —inaugurated at the beginning of the 1980’s— is, with all its complexity, one of the last conceptions of this transforming spirit which has finally been left to one side by the dynamics of market forces.
The Sostenere il palazzo dell’utopia (Holding the Building of Utopia) project consists of a series of portraits of Corviale’s inhabitants holding in their hands the model of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, recreating a type of democratic and egalitarian version of medieval imagery (where the powerful: popes, bishops and kings were represented holding the city they had founded), in a modest poetical attempt to re-found the possibility of Utopia.

Rozebeke, Zwalm, Belgium, 2003

Los Vientos taco stand

Mexico DF, 2003

Girona, 2002

Existenzminimum (Minimum Existence, 2002) consists of a scale reproduction of the monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht which Mies van der Rohe designed in 1926 for Eduard Fuchs, the collector and notable member of the German Communist Party. The monument was built in the Friedrichsfelde cemetery in Berlin and was destroyed in 1935 by the Nazi government.

Domènec turns the monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht – leaders of the failed Spartacist revolution (perhaps the most serious attempt to establish a fairer society in Germany) and senior figures in Germany’s communist left who were assassinated by parapolice forces in 1919 – into a mobile home, a humble cabin, a small and fragile refuge which loses its original grandiloquence as it is recycled into a minimal home and literally assimilated into a set of DIY tools which connect, via the title, with the central concept of the second International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in 1929. That is to say that it connects with the proposal put forward by the most outstanding architects of the Modern Movement to establish the scientific bases on which to guarantee a minimum level of dignified and universal existence. Today, when so many millions of people live in infrahuman conditions in the shanty towns that surround the mega-cities of triumphant capitalism, this intention seems like a cruel historical irony.

The replica grants new life to the destroyed monument and traces a link, at a human scale, between the utopian potential of the emancipatory ideologies of modernity and their hypothetical critical readaptations.

Installation in the Parc de la Devesa de Girona, October 2002, then at the Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani de Girona, November 2002.

In 2009 the project was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona MACBA, as part of the exhibition Modernologies.

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Apartment in Ferran Street, Barcelona 2002

This intervention formed part of the project Pis compartit. (Shared Apartment)
Organised by: Eduardo Pérez Soler

This consisted of mounting a temporary installation inside an apartment shared by students of architecture. For a month several artists intervened in different areas of the flat interfering with the day to day life of the three residents. The general public were invited to visit the interventions.

The Glass Door project consisted of an ironical game using the limits of transparency in modern architecture, by substituting a wooden bathroom door for a transparent one. The most private of all places became public, seen by everyone. Transparency suddenly became exhibitionism.

No Fixed Abode

Digital video in DVD, loop, 2002

The camera follows and records the journey made by a truck transporting a prefabricated house along side roads.

2000

Serigraph edition of a photograph of the wooden model of «l’Unité d’habitation» in the middle of the forest.
Serigraph edition, 170 x 124 cm. 70 exemplars.

20 of each used in the intervention in several advertising panels (bus shelters and billboards) in Mataró, Other 20 used in the intervention several advertising panels (bus shelters and billboards) in Banyoles.

An architect’s model always stands for a proposal for the future, a promise, a wish, the representation of an idea built to scale which one day will become a tangible place that is both real and liveable.

In Domestic the model of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation is featured, this emblematic building from the modern movement, this perfect place for dwelling with the promise of a better life for the lower classes left abandoned in the middle of a forest; weeds have begun to smother the building.

The sign is eloquent: the Unité, a modern architectural paradigm for living happily in the world, devised as a universal solution based on a number of excessively predetermined and utopic suppositions which has now become a simple derelict building. The proposition presented thus expresses a dual intention: a game that subverts the illusory pretensions of modernity, in which an abandoned, vulnerable wooden house takes the place of dreams of building a solid foundation in the world, yet one which is only renderings and photo-montages of the new urban planning projects, just like in the colourful advertisements that feature models, that is, an idealised representation of what perhaps one day might be, will be.