An intervention at the Mies van der Rhoe and Lilly Reich Pavilion, Barcelona 2018

An production of Mies van der Rohe Foundation and MACBA

Barcelona became Spain’s economic driver in the nineteenth century with the industrial revolution. In a perfect symbiosis of public and private interests, the authorities and the industrialists designed a series of events to internationally disseminate the image of Barcelona as a business city: the Universal Exhibition of 1888 and the 1929 International Exposition that was conceived as a great propaganda device of the Spanish monarchy and to project the image of Catalan industry abroad.

The 1929 Exposition venue, built according to Puig i Cadafalch’s project, was located in Montjuïc and represented a radical transformation of an important part of the mountain.

The industrial and commercial expansion, the transformation and growth of the city and the construction of the buildings of the Exposition needed enormous cheap labour, and the local proletariat was not sufficient to meet demand. This caused a great migration process. Due to the lack of public housing and to speculation policies, many of the families of immigrants who, fleeing misery, came from all over Spain to Barcelona from the mid-nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, were forced to live in very precarious conditions. They lived in self-constructed shacks on the edges of the city forming real neighbourhoods such as the Somorrostro or the Camp de la Bota. In the late fifties, the shanty towns reached their peak with a population of between 70,000 and 100,000 people.

Shacks were built all over Montjuïc, from Poble Sec to the Ponent quarries, from the 1929 International Exposition venue to the castle.

After Spain’s Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship decided to use some of the 1929 International Exposition venues and facilities to place immigrants.  In the beginning of the fifties, The Palace of the Missions became a centre of “classification of indigents” used to arrest and classify immigrants from all over Spain to be returned to their place of origin. Without having committed any crime and after spending an indefinite period of imprisonment, about 15,000 people were deported in about 230 chartered trains. The City Council contributed to aggravating the situation when it decided to use the Olympic Stadium to “temporarily” house the neighbours from the Somorrostro. They remained there until 1968, abandoned by the administration, along with families from other facilities such as the Pavilion of Belgium.

Thanks to: Ivan Blasi, Delícia Burset, Xavi Camino, Helena Castellà, Anna Cerdà, Teresa Grandas, Jordi Mitjà, Dani Montlleó, Anna Ramos.

Public Hearing

2018

Lacquered steel and dyed, varnished okoume plywood
240 × 277 × 164.8 cm

Work produced in collaboration with MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

In May 1963, the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published, drawing together Hannah Arendt’s reports on the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel in the SS and one of the greatest criminals in history. In the Spanish edition, the first chapter of the book is entitled ‘Audiencia pública’ (Public Hearing).

The Audiència pública project (2018) offers a lifesize recreation of the cabin, which was specially designed to ensure Eichmann’s safety during the trial, here converted into a ‘dumb’ sculpture, aseptic and divested of all traces of the drama that was played out but at the same time ‘noisy’, as it echoes the voices of the victims of history. If, as Zygmunt Bauman states, the Holocaust, far from being a deviation in the passage of progress, appears as the technological and organisational result of industrial and bureaucratic society, and is a phenomenon tightly linked to the very characteristics of modernity, where do we place ourselves in the face of this small piece of architecture that challenges us? What role do we take in this public hearing?

To the Dead Heroes of the Revolution, 2018

Sandblasted stainless steel
156 x 156 x 89 cm
Work produced in collaboration with MACBA

The monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, very forceful and formally and politically effective, became a meeting point for the German radical left. To reinforce its political function, beyond the metaphor of the volumes of used factory adobe bricks, Mies van der Rohe also designed a series of elements of normal communist political symbology: a large steel five-pointed star with a hammer and sickle in its centre and a pole on which to hoist the Red Flag on major occasions.

The star measured two metres and eighty centimetres across and a small manufacturer could not be commissioned to make it and thus Mies van der Rohe commissioned the Krupp steelworks. The Krupps, a major German industrial dynasty later known for their collaboration with Nazism and the use of slave labour during the Second World War, refused to supply a communist symbol. Faced with this refusal, the architect ordered five pieces of diamond-shaped steel, five pieces divested of any political significance, which Krupp agreed to supply. Once they had been assembled, they became the five-pointed star which presided over the monument until it was taken down by the Nazis and exhibited in a museum of insignia and flags which had been confiscated from enemies.

The Den toten Helden der Revolution piece (To the Dead Heroes of the Revolution, 2018) recreates this prior moment of impasse, in which five silent geometric shapes, at rest, can unleash their capacity for political activism.

Photos 5 and 6: Roberto Ruiz / Photo 7: Jordi Folgado