2012

Edición para Arts Coming
First edition of 50
Vaporized beech wood, varnish. 30 x 8 x 10 cm
This work includes assembly instructions and timeline.

In 2002, the artist built a reproduction to scale of the monument to Rosa Luxemburgo, Karl Liebknecht and the Spartakists killed by the German police in 1919. This monument was designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928 and destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. The original project designed by the rationalist architect held a constructivist syntax and was dedicated to the leaders of the German revolutionary proletariat, two reasons why this should have been demolished by the nazi state and a great allegory on the failure of the political project of Modernity. The work by Domènec, based on this episode, is called Existenzminimum and the monument became a tiny, portable dwelling which brought back to us the memory of Europe’s recent history from unhappiness to the present.

This work was erected in the parque de la Devesa in Girona and later at the Fundació Espais. More recently, in 2010, the construction formed part of the exhibition entitled Modernologies in the MACBA (Barcelona) and contributed new comprehensive interpretations on the passing of time and the political troubles of at the crucial times of the past. Now, without renouncing the political significance, the structure built on a smaller scale has now become a building game which allows one to continue activating critical interpretations. The wooden pieces we have to handle contain a profound reflection on aesthetics of resistance, within reach of everyone.

The Worker’s Hand

Helsinki, 2011 – 2012
2 channel HD video installation, 46’
Photo series, 8 C-prints, 70 x 50 cm each.
Scale model of Kulttuuritalo. Fired clay.
Documents and pictures from Kansan Arkisto.

The exhibition The Worker’s Hand (Rakentajan käsi) presents Domènec’s new installation, which seeks to revisit the forgotten history of Kulttuuritalo (The House of Culture) designed by Alvar Aalto and built in 1952–58 in what was then the working class district of Kallio in Helsinki. The installation is the result of Domènec’s collaborative research with Helsinki-based Spanish curator Jon Irigoyen. The project was devised and carried out during Domènec’s artist residency at HIAP Suomenlinna in autumn 2011 and summer 2012.

Kulttuuritalo, a cultural complex housing a concert hall, offices, a theatre and a library, was commissioned by the SKP (Communist Party of Finland), and largely built by volunteers. The exhibition focuses on the volunteer workers, trade unionists and families who responded to the SKP’s call to build a “house for all workers” and gave more than 500,000 hours of their lives to the realisation of the project.

Revisiting the history of the construction of Kulttuuritalo, Domènec’s project aims to recover the memories of the numerous militant workers and volunteers who participated in the collective construction of this symbol of modernism and icon of the Finnish labour movement. At the same time, the exhibition addresses the historical gap between the era when Kulttuuritalo was commissioned by the SKP, and the present moment, when the building has been transformed into an architectural monument stripped of its ideological ‘baggage’. This attempt to revisit the past prompts reflections on the collapse of the modern project and on the way we experience historical time.

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“We were going to help the evenings after our work or days off. We had a great hope of achieving self Cultural House. It was a project that we felt very special: a building designed by a famous architect and built by volunteers from the left. Many thought it would never come to completion the building, because it was a project organized by the labour movement ”

Fragment of conversation with Riitta Suhonen, 73 years old; when she was 15, she participated as a volunteer in building the Kulttuuritalo, designed by Alvar Aalto.

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Thanks to:

HIAP, Can Xalant Center for Creation and Contemporary Knowledge of Mataró, Institut Ramon Llull, CoNCA, Spanish Embassy in Finland, Pixelache Festival, The Association of Pensioners (Eläkeläiset ry), Pirjo Kaihovaara, Tiina Rajala, José M. Sánchez (Kinetic Pixel), Ernest Borras, Berta Julibert.

Special thanks:

Kansan Arkisto and the Kulttuuritalo volunteers: Eine Kauppila, Osmo Halenius, Kerttu Laine, Antero Koski, Matti Lääperi, Toivo Lindroos, Elbe Novitsky, Irja Pesonen, Sisko Salonen, Petteri Sosoi, Riitta Suhonen, Tapio Rajala, Veijo Sinisalo.

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This project has been shown in different places like:

Kaapelin Galleria, Helsinki, 2012
EspaiDos, Sala Muncunill, Terrassa, 2014
MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Barcelona, 2018
Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018. Kochi, 2018
Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila, 2019
Halfhouse, Barcelona, 2021
Kuva/Tila, Helsinki, 2022

Video, 4’ 24’’

Project carried out for the publication CAPS.A. 11 in prison

Intervention in the prison of Mataró, 2011

Video edited with the collaboration of Can Xalant, Centre de Creació i Pensament Contemporani de Mataró.

Panoptic adj. Showing or seeing the whole at one view.

Device designed by the English thinker Jeremy Bentham in 1791. The panoptic enables the guard to see (-opticon) all (pan-) the prisoners without knowing if they are being watched or not.

French philosopher Michel Foucault thoroughly analyzed the concept of panoptic –the eye that sees all – in his work published in 1975 entitled Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Watch and punish: The birth of prisons).

…Bentham raised the issues in terms of power: the population as the target of the relationships of domination. (…) One look is enough. A glance that controls, and which each, feeling its burden, ends up interiorizing to the extent of watching oneself…

Mataró prison (Elies Rogent, 1858). This was the first prison built in Spain according to the panoptic system.

2011 – 2015

Inkjet printing on paper, wood and single-channel video,
colour, sound, 46min 40s
Model: 2.5 x 101 x 205
41 photographs of various sizes

“As in all real cities, we have constructed mosques, a kasbah and even a refugee camp”
Arick Moré, lieutenant colonel of the Israel Defense Forces

The Baladia Future City project (2011/2015) is centred on the Baladia City National Urban Training Center, popularly known as ‘Chicago’, a military training centre near the Tze’elim military base in the Negev desert in southern Israel. It is a model city of 7.4 square kilometres which consists of 1,100 basic modules which the planners of the military mission can reconfigure with the aim of representing specific Arab cities. Israel’s Defence Forces use it to plan for war in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria and its construction was financed largely with the help of the United States military.

In the essay ‘Slouching towards dystopia: the new military futurism’, the writer and journalist Matt Carr analyses a series of military reports which imagine future threats to security. This new military futurism sees as risks to the western way of life the scarcity of resources, large-scale migration and the growth of failed macro-cities. Military futurologists set out an eminently urban war scenario, of house-to-house fighting. As Mike Davis, sociologist for the Pentagon states, the ‘failed cities’ of countries in the Global South have been identified as ‘the key battlefield of the future’.

This installation is laid out as a display and a documentary archive which collates images – the majority produced by the soldiers themselves and found on the internet, YouTube and Facebook – and a model of the city based on Google Earth photographs. In 2015, a video filmed in Tel Aviv was added to the project, in which three soldiers in the Israeli army reserves explain their personal experience in this pretend city.

Following an interview conducted by architect Eyal Weizman with the commander and instructor of the Operational Theory Research Institute of the Israeli special intervention forces, Avi Kokhavi (architect and career officer, responsible for military operations in the Nablus casbah and the Balata refugee camp), Weizman states with surprise that the theoretical bases used by the Israeli army to develop new military techniques in urban warfare are repeatedly based on texts by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and situationism, among other things, and wonders about the use of these critical theories as ‘tools’ in the hands of military thinkers (1). He also confirms how the same instructors use concepts and references from architecture and contemporary art, such as some notions developed by Gordon Matta-Clark (2).

The project, also, aims at exploring the paradoxes between architectural trends developed in Israel since the 70s as an attempt to provide the architecture with “local identity” –by appropriating the Palestinian imaginary– and the “international style” developed during the first decades of the new state, and their most dystopian deviation: the fake city of Baladia.

1 Eyal Weizman: ‘Walking through wall. Soldiers as architects in the Israeli / Palestinian conflict’, Arxipèlag d’excepcions. Barcelona: CCCB, 2007.

2 Eyal Weizman: ‘Walking through wall. Soldiers as architects in the Israeli / Palestinian conflict’, op. cit.

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Curator: Maral Mikirditsian

Model maker: Oriol Poch

Acknowledgements: Achiya Schatz, Avner Gvaryahu, Shay Davidovich, Breaking the Silence, Miki Kratsman, Nirith Nelson, Martí Peran.

*The piece belongs to the MACBA Collection.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.