Myohoji Temple, Sakai (Osaka), Japan. 2016

Wood, fluorescent light, plastic sheet, several objects.
182 x 66 x 60 cm.

‘no jyuku sha’
There seem to be about 25 000 homeless people in Japan. Some of them describe themselves as ‘no jyuku sha’ or ‘field campers’ – as they manage to settle in parks and other public spaces on a more permanent basis, easily distinguishable by their tent houses made of stark blue plastic covers.
Especially in Osaka, these ‘campers’ not only organize themselves increasingly over the internet, they also engage in political activities to stand up for their rights and protest against the increasing park clearings by the municipality.

Sakai Shelter was part of Sacay Arte Porto.
Produced by Sakai Art Project.

Acknowledgments: Akane Asaoka, Kengo Shibatsuji, Takeshi Nakamura, MyohojiTemple, Community Cafe Pangea.

The Collectivization of Everything

P74 Gallery, Ljubljana. 2015

“Among the periphery of modernity belongs the phenomenon of socialist modernism, which has remained long decades on the margin of expert analysis. With the cycle “Modernity” that we began at P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute several years ago, we contemplate the ambivalences, limitations and consequences of modernity and simultaneously encourage new, critical readings. This year we have begun a new programme of artistic residencies. Our first guest is the acclaimed visual artist from Barcelona, Domènec.

The current exhibition presents two interconnected, and even complementary, projects: the project Voyage en Icarie (Journey to Icaria) (2012) and the new installation Kolektivizacija vsega (The Collectivisation of Everything) (2015). The latter came into being based on Domènec’s research of sculptor Zdenko Kalin’s monument to one of the founders of the Communist Party of Slovenia and the Anti-Imperialist Front and leader of the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People, Boris Kidric.

In 2012 Domènec was invited to the Museum of Contemporary Arts Metelkova (MSUM) in Ljubljana to lead a workshop. While walking through the city, he came across some street graffiti with the text “Kolektivizacija vsega!” (Collectivisation of everything!) and took a photo of it. An interesting discussion followed with the participants of the workshop about the heritage of the socialistic period and of the ambiguous relationship to that past. Twenty-four years after the declaration of Slovenian independence and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the understanding of recent history is still problematic. In such a context, how do we position the memorial statue of Boris Kidric We can understand the statue of Boris Kidri? in a packing case as an unpleasant presence of the spirit of the past, reminding us of the mistakes that we made or demanding that we once again consider and attempt utopian alternatives to global capitalism.

In the middle of the 19th century, the French utopian socialist Étienne Cabet developed in his novel Voyage en Icarie the idea of the future as a just society in which there was no property and no money. In 1848, a group of adventurers followed Cabet’s call and left for Texas, with the goal of building their own Icaria. The journey ended in tragedy. The video work poetically restores and illuminates the memory of the event and its protagonists, who in the 19th century, in the time of the rise of wild capitalism, dared to imagine an alternative society and even tried to live it.”
(P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute, Ljubljana, setembre 2015)

Kolektivizacija vsega

Packing case, 430 x 200 x 130 cm

Four black and white photos, 40 x 60 cm c / u. Documentation of the creation process monument to Boris Kidric found in the archives of the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia.

Color photos found on the Internet, unknown authors.

Produced by P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute / P74 Gallery

2015

DVD, 30’
Directors: Domènec and Sàgar Malé
Script: Sàgar Malé, Kilian Estrada, Domènec
Camera: Maria Acázar, Maria Cilleros, Kilian Estrada, Sàgar Malé
Edition: Kilian Estrada
Voice: Mònica Subirats
Production: Mapasonor
Text: ‘The Monster’s Tail’ Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir
a documentary film by MAPASONOR
Mapasonor ACD 2015

Icaria is not an avenue

Avenida Icaria, Barcelona, 2015
Curator: Andrea Rodriguez Novoa
Curatorial Clube
13.02.15

Icaria is an island imagined by the french philosopher and utopian socialist Étiénne Cabet in his book « Voyage en Icarie »(1839), in it he describes a social model that is antagonic to capitalism. One of the catalonian followers of the icaria project was the engineer Ildefonso Cerdá, author of the Barcelonean “Ensanche” (urbanistic expansion plan) named the Avenue that still bears this name.

Ildefons Cerdà, an admirer, more or less secretly, of Cabet’s utopian ideas, in memory of this community, in his Urban Plan of Barcelona – which was ultimately an egalitarian proposal – planned to call Avinguda d’Icària the road formerly called Camí del Poble Nou Cemetery; even in some drawings and plans it indicates a whole large area of Poble Nou under the name of Icària.

·············

At 12:30 pm on a Saturday we met in the crossroad between Avenida Icària and the calle Marina de Barcelona. We gathered some stones in the nearby area and at 1:00 pm we walked from the avenue to the Cementerio General de Barcelona, in Poble Nou. On the way the artist distributes three hundred xerox copies in A4 in black and white with the phrases

« Icària no es una avinguda.
https://voyageenicarie.wordpress.com ».

We went down the avenue again until the point of origin watching the xerox copies. Some of the papers will stay there until the next working day, others may stay longer, and some have already started to fly away. It’s 3:15 pm.

Demolished Monument is a proposal for “restoring” the demolition of the monument to General Prim in Barcelona’s Parc de la Ciutadella.

Nonument, MACBA, Barcelona, 2014
Curators: Josep Bohigas & Bartomeu Marí.
A production of MACBA, Barcelona.

Model and digital print.

Edition of 3

In 1871 the people of Paris rose up in arms and established the Commune on the basis of anarchist and socialist principles. On 16 May, the revolutionary government tore down the Vendôme column. The column, erected on the orders of Napoleon to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, was considered by the Commune as «a monument of barbarism, an affirmation of militarism, a permanent insult to the defeated and an attack on fraternity».

After the Commune had been brought down by the French army, the Government, under the presidency of General Mac Mahon, had the column rebuilt.

In 1882 Barcelona’s authorities decided to erect a monument to General Prim, soldier and politician, who wad been responsible for bombing the city and crushing of the «Jamància» popular uprising of 1843, as well as the brutal repression of African slaves in 1848 when he was Capitan-general of Puerto Rico.

On 20 December 1936, in the first few months of the Spanish Civil War and in the middle of the revolutionary process, the Joventuts Llibertàries, (anarchist youth movement) demolished the monument.

In 1948 Franco’s municipal authorities decided to rebuild the monument and commissioned sculptor Frederic Marès to produce a copy of the original sculpture.

Political iconoclasm as a form of expropriation of the symbolic heritage of the oligarchy and the construction of the public space.

Model maker:
Oriol Poch

photo labels:
Pérez de Rozas, 1936. Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
Josep Brangulí, 1936. Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya

Project for the Web, 2014

In the framework of the cycle “Outdoors. Three contemporary narratives of fragility: Isabel Banal, Domènec and Toni Giró” curated by Jordi Font.
Container. IGAC

The project consists of an intervening cartography of Occupied Palestinian Territories from Google Maps (1). The hundreds of images of fragments of territory (200 meters away from the ground) have been captured on the computer screen and recomposed as a puzzle to build an immense aerial image. A material obtained with a technology of military origin (photography by satellite and geolocation) initially restricted, which is now accessible to everyone on the web. But all this over-information, all this alleged “hypervisibility” hides, in fact, the logic of Israeli occupation. The intervention on the map, in a kind of reverse cartography, is to manually erase all Palestinian traces and leave only visible the web of settlements, military bases (2) and exclusive routes for Israelis that cross the whole territory and make imposible its normal functioning as a country. In the act of being erased, the Palestinians become visible as “naked life” in a void space of law, in a state of permanent exception.

1 / The documents leaked by Edward Snowden have revealed that Google Maps is part of the global surveillance network operated by several Western intelligence agencies.
2 / Some of the military installations do not appear in Google Maps images, as they are deliberately deleted or camouflaged for “security reasons.”

Spanish Architecture, 1939 -1975
(2013 – 2018)

Curator: Àlex Mitrani.

Series of 20 images, digital copies on aluminium each measuring 45 x 60 cm.
A Production of MAC Mataró Art Contemporani (2014) and MACBA (2018).

After the civil war hundreds of thousands of Republican prisoners were sentenced to forced labour. Terri de Mataró (artist and cultural activist), explains in his memoirs his experience in the Battalions of Punished Workers: “I lived scenes of bloody violence, epic drunkenness, cruelties spawned from whims. I came into touch with human degradation. In Africa I wished to die as never before.” Numerous public infrastructures and government buildings, from the Guadalquivir Canal to the sinister Valle de los Caídos, were built by the State or by private companies with the relevant concession, employing a cheap workforce held in captivity.

Francisco Prieto-Moreno wrote the presentation of the architecture section in the catalogue of the III Biennial of Latin American Art held in Barcelona in 1955: “What [architecture] now needs is only the creative genius of the individual.” Francisco Prieto Moreno, who was to head the National Devastated Regions and Repairs Service among other positions, defended traditionalist aesthetic with an idealistic hazy rhetoric. But, above all, his quote on the genius of the architect is just one example of the perverse cynicism of Franco’s discourse, where propaganda hid the fierce repression and a pompous heroism protected the most ignominious shame.

Domènec offers us a catalogue of some of the public works made with the sweat and blood of Republican prisoners that is both accurate and disturbing and which is perfectly outlined and depicted with luminous clarity. The black he has chosen for this prolongs the existentialist and demanding darkness of informalist abstraction, and also forms a link with the tradition of the dark side of Spain. The cold and uncomfortable cataloguing reveals for us the architectural traces of human and political crime in its objectivity and contrast. (Àlex Mitrani)

*The complete edition 3 of 3 (20 images) of “Spanish Architecture, 1939-1975” belongs to the Mataró Museum (Col·lecció Nacional d’Art Contemporani)

2013

Wooden model and Formica chairs.

Intervention in the Casa Capell, Mataró, as part of the “Hidden Modernity” project.

Conversation Piece is a term used to describe a type of paintings from the 18th century. The conversation pieces are usually portraits of groups of family or friends engaged in conversation in domestic environments. Eventually, however, this term led to defining any object or part thereof which caused debate because of its unusual status.

This particular Conversation Piece placed two Formica chairs, typical of things found in homes in the 50s and 60s face to face and a model of the Narkomfin social housing building was used to bridge them: an unusual object that provokes conversation.

In the 1930s, Le Corbusier travelled to the Soviet Union to learn about the radical experiments of collectivism and social housing undertaken by young Russian architects, and the Narkomfin is the most emblematic building of this experiment, which was aborted by Stalinism. Le Corbusier talks about the success and failure of these social experiments from which he drew lessons for his great project of collective housing: the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille.

*Property of: Col·lecció “La Caixa” Art Contemporani

GIF, a project for the Arts Coming Website.
2013

In 1871 the government of the Paris Commune – the first autonomous insurrection of the proletariat, according to Marx – demolished the Vendome Column in a highly symbolic act of political iconoclasm. The column, which was erected by order of Napoleon Bonaparte to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz and to honor the glory of the Imperial Navy, was considered by the Commune as “a monument to barbarism, an assertion of militarism, a permanent insult of the conquerors to the vanquished, and an attack against fraternity.”

Journey to Icaria

Ingràvid, Figueres, 2012

Pyrotechnic sign and wooden structure, 840 x 300 x 150 cm.

Table with documents

Video (2’43”) produced in collaboration with Can Xalant, Centre de Creació i Pensament Contemporani de Mataró.

See video:
http://vimeo.com/115176342

Voyage to Nowhere

Nowhere is, in the typical rhetoric of Modernity, the space of utopia (from the Greek ou, “no” and topos, “place”, which literally means “nowhere”) and is always situated somewhere beyond the horizon in a perpetual, unachievable future. In the mid 19th century the French philosopher and utopian socialist Étienne Cabet put forward his ideas in Voyage en Icarie, a novel inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia, which envisaged a future fair and just society in which there would be no property or money.

The Icaria project achieved wide acclaim among the working class in Catalonia; and one of its most renowned followers was Narcís Monturiol who hailed from the town of Figueres in the north of Catalonia.

In 1848 following a call by Cabet, a group of adventurers, which included a number of Catalans, set sail for Texas with the aim of building their own Icaria; alas this ephemeral adventure turned out to be a tragic failure.

This intervention aims to poetically restitute and “shed light on” the historic memory of events and people that in the nineteenth century, in the midst of growing wild capitalism, in addition to fighting to improve living conditions, they dared to imagine alternative societies and try to put it in practice.

To install in the Rambla de Figueres, close to the monument dedicated to Narcís Monturiol, a pyrotechnic sign and text that lights up this utopian attempt for one brief moment: Voyage en Icarie.

Simultaneously a “small Icarian library” is laid out, a simple display that includes material, documents, texts and images of the Icarian adventure, together with other utopian projects from the period and information on groups that today are attempting to build alternative social platforms to the capitalist system.