Playground (Tatlin in México)

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.

Interruptions. 10 years, 1,340 metres

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

 

Motocarro

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.

Vivir sin dejar rastro

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.

 

Mon Unité Mobile

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.

No Place Like Home

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.

 

Domènec. Unité Mobile (Roads Are Also Places). Martí Peran

When a hermeneutic aesthetics is obliged to intelligibly describe the premises according to which works of art have an essential raison d’être, but one that only manifests itself when those works are put into practice by interpretation, the most relevant example to draw on is the game. In effect, thanks to a long tradition of examining the impulse to play, this appears as a paradigm of the truth of aesthetic experience, that which occurs only and exclusively through the act of putting the works in play. There can be different rules and norms, instruments and player, but the game as such only comes into being in a here and now, through the action that sets this whole compendium of elements in motion. This reflection gives aesthetics the pretext it needs not to hold on to certain idealistic bases that have already entered into irreversible crisis and thus to continue to cling to the belief that art has an essence, which may be meagre and fleeting (only revealed in the instant of playing/ performing/ interpreting), but still effective for all that.

But the game is something more than a lovely trick for rescuing idealistic suppositions. Together with that almost desperate interpretation, the game can also be conceptualized as a direct product of homo ludens – in the line in which this was reworked by Huizinga and then taken up by the Situationists – and seen more as a way of consummating a real experience rather than as an (aesthetic) experience of truth. This may seem a very minor adjustment, but it is crucial. While hermeneutics seeks to maintain the idea of art as a means of access to a profound truth, the new game theory is solely committed to the value ofthe experience in real time, not oniy alien to a possible universe of categorical principles, but also free of any productive obligation. The game can thus be converted into an effective strategy, not for maintaining an antiquated epistemology, but for toppling it once and for all. After suitably amending its Surrealist antecedents (the game, like the dream, has always been a mirror in which to observe deep unconscious impulses), the Situationists played to create situations with this new perspective: convinced that only the freedom ofthe game permits the construction of an equally free subject, capable of accumulating real experiences instead of getting lost in the search for an ineffable meaning.

Unité Mobile (Roads Are Also Places) is, in the first instance, a toy; a remote-controlled truck that can be driven at one’s pleasure. It would be wrong to call it a sculpture, or even a mobile sculpture that, once set in motion, is reinstated as such. It is a toy – to continue with the dichotomy we have established here – that is not idealistic but Situationist. The clearest proof of this is, of course, the use of a model of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation as the truck’s container. The gesture is eloquent: the modern architectural paradigm for the happy dwelling, conceived as universal solution on the basis of excessively predetermined and utopian premises, has now been converted into a mere playful instrument, restless and absurd if it is not handled with freedom. The proposition expresses a dual intention: play as a paraphrase ofthe value of real experience, flexible and non-productive and, in addition, a game that subverts the illusory pretensions of modernity, taking the place of dreams by constructing a solid anchorage in the world – and the Unité is a paradigm in its forms of resolving, architectonically, this epistemological illusion of being in the world – with a mobile toy that is domestic, actually usable and vulnerable.

The video recording ofthe remote-controlled unit circulating freely in the corridors ofthe Unité d’Habitation in Marseille redoubles the intentions ofthe project. It is in the self-same static space designed as a universal container of habitation that a ludic mobility – the same ludic mobility that Constant expressed in “The Principle of Disorientation” – 1 is now imposed: a ludic mobility capable of managing its own trajectories, in much the same way as the inhabitants of the Unité ended up modifying the archetype by constantly adapting it to their needs.

Martí Peran
“Mira cómo se mueven”. Fundación Telefónica, Madrid 2005

1 “There will no longer be any centre to be reached, but instead an infinite number of moving centres. There will no longer be any chance of getting off track in the sense of getting lost, but rather in the more positive sense of finding previously unknown paths.” Constant, “The principle of disorientation” in X. Costa / L. Andreotti (eds), Situationists. Art, Politics, Urbanism, MACBA/ Actar, Barcelona, 1996, pp. 86-87.

Rieres/Rambles

Osservatorio Nomade/Barcelona (Domènec, Pau Faus, Giulia Fiocca, Pere Grimau, Paolo Nadalin, Elvira Pujol, Anna Recasens, Lorenzo Romito, Glòria Safont-Tria, Jordina Sangrà, Laia Solé, Joan Vila-Puig, Debora Zanette)
2007

Routes around the Barcelona
urban area

Rieres/Rambles is a territorial research project promoted by Stalker, and organised by the OSSERVATORIO NOMADE/BARCELONA. It is part of a series of similar projects undertaken previously, such as Campagna Romana (Rome, 2006) and Barilonga (Bari, 2006). The project aims to find incidences of new models for interpreting territory in the Greater Barcelona Area based on direct, collective and transdisciplinary experiences that have the practice of roaming as their basis. Two phases of work: «Roaming» and «Variable Distances and Multiple Identities».
«Roaming»: A three-day group walk (12th-14th April 2007) with five different departure points and five areas of simultaneous research: Sitges and the Garraf; Olesa de Montserrat and the Baix Llobregat; Viladecavalls and the Vallès Occidental; Llinars del Vallès and the Vallès Oriental; and Sant Andreu de Llavaneres and the Maresme.
«Variable Distances and Multiple Identities» (2007-2009): This involved the creation of workshops and working groups in order to carry out research into, reflect on and promote new models for interpreting territory in the Greater Barcelona Area.
The exploration of the Greater Barcelona Area on foot as the basis for territorial research, involves adopting a position outside the guidelines that construct the standardised experience of everyday life. By observing and listening to the erratic roaming line we have been able to experience a reality that eschews superficial categorisations and offers multiple possibilities for research far removed from media simplifications.

Superquadra casa-armário

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

48_Nakba

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

Monthly Archive:
September 2024
February 2024
April 2023
December 2022
November 2022
February 2022
December 2021
August 2021
July 2021
April 2021
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
November 2017
October 2017
July 2017
May 2017
April 2017
February 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
July 2016
June 2016
May 2016
March 2016
November 2015
September 2015
August 2015
July 2015
June 2015
April 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
July 2014
June 2014
April 2014
March 2014
February 2014
January 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
September 2013
August 2013
June 2013
May 2013
April 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
April 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
December 2008
November 2008