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Domènec. De lo moderno usado. Martí Peran

Exit Express # 45, Junio 2010

A lo largo de poco más de una década el trabajo de Domènec (www.domenec.net) se ha concentrado en gravitar, con órbitas distintas en cada ocasión, alrededor de las paradojas, los desatinos y los fracasos de la arquitectura moderna. Esta prospección crítica de la modernidad – como se demostró recientemente en la exposición “Modernologías”- se ha convertido en uno de los relatos más interesantes entre los que componen la partitura del arte contemporáneo. La justificación de esta deriva ha de ser necesariamente compleja, pues responde a numerosos elementos. En primer lugar, representa una oportunidad idónea para someter los presupuestos utópicos a una severo correctivo; por otra parte, la modernidad revisada allana el camino para desarrollar un arte crítico desde la memoria colectiva con todos sus negativos intrínsecos; finalmente, y quizás más importante todavía, la constatación de las fisuras que atraviesan al proyecto moderno, permite diagnosticar con notable precisión muchos de los desajustes y desamparos ideológicos propios de la contemporaneidad heredera de ese mismo proyecto. Todo este abanico de narraciones son puestas en juego en los proyectos desarrollados por Domènec aunque, como veremos, con una serie de matices y añadidos que otorgan a su propuesta un valor singular.

El modo habitual de exhibir la caída del ángel de la Historia lo resuelve Domènec mediante dos gestos de talante bien distinto. El primero consiste en sintetizar los contenidos del programa moderno en maquetas a escala, al modo de objetos escultóricos con una función contra-conmemorativa. A su vez, la segunda operación consiste en instalar estas mismas maquetas en el interior del mundo real para que reciclen sus funciones y propósitos y, ante todo, para que los supuestos teóricos que contienen se sometan a la experiencia y al uso. Con este doble movimiento, los proyectos se convierten en operaciones de recontextualización, en las que los espacios y los tiempos se repliegan y desdoblan, denotando en cada movimiento lo que podría conservarse de la historia, lo que debe cancelarse y, sobre todo, lo que cabría reformular y adecuar a las necesidades reales.

Los ejemplos de esta suerte de metodología de trabajo son numerosos. En Existenzminimum (2002) el monumento que Mies van der Rohe dedicara a Rosa Luxemburgo, se convierte en un habitáculo portátil con un pequeño manual para su automontaje; la Taqueria de los vientos (2003) reconvierte la torre original de Gonzalo Fonseca para los Juegos Olímpicos México 1968 en una taqueria ambulante que, más allá de dispensar comida y simbolizar los derroteros de la economía informal, evoca la represión gubernamental que precedió a la inauguración de los Juegos que habían de modernizar el pais; Unité Mobile (Roads are also places) (2005) convierte una maqueta de l’Unité d’Habitation en un camión teledirigido que circula, ante la sorpresa de los habitantes del emblemático edificio de Corbusier, por las distintas dependencias del complejo habitacional en Marsella. En una perspectiva muy cercana, en Sostenere il palazzo dell’utopia (2004) los usuarios reales del edificio romano de Corviale, inspirado en las soluciones tipológicas del urbanismo moderno para higienizar las zonas periféricas, aparecen retratos sosteniendo la maqueta, de nuevo, de l’Unité, reivindicando así, como sucediera con la iconografía tradicional de los mecenas sosteniendo las maquetas de sus promociones eclesiásticas o palaciegas, su verdadero protagonismo y su legitimidad para modificar el edificio en función de sus reales necesidades. Todavía operando con esta misma lógica, y entre los trabajos más recientes, Superquadra casa-armário (2007) reinterpreta los bloques habitacionales de Lucio Costa en Brasilia al modo de prototipos de refugio.

Una cuestión fundamental en todos estos proyectos es su vinculación con el contexto específico donde se formulan y se ejecutan. En efecto, esa revisión de la modernidad no se resuelve de un modo abstracto y desde el horizonte de lo teórico sino que, por el contrario, se encarna en cada ocasión acorde a determinados episodios modernos propios del lugar. Así, por ejemplo, la taqueria se concibe y se ejecuta en México D.F y la casa-armário en Brasilia. Este detalle no es anecdótico sino todo lo contrario; es lo que permite, no solo interpretar el paradigma moderno dentro de un marco histórico y social específico sino también, y mucho más importante, acelera el cortocircuito por el cual lo moderno ideológico y programático desciende hasta el efectivo valor de uso que, necesariamente, lo subvierte en función de los imaginarios reales y las expectativas mundanas. Con ello, esta prospección de la modernidad acentúa el valor de la experiencia real como el lugar desde el cual articular la crítica e, incluso, concede al conjunto de trabajos una efectiva dimensión pública.

El determinante papel del contexto real es precisamente lo que se convierte en el núcleo de trabajos como Real Estate (2007) y 48_Nakba (2007). En esta ocasión, sin referentes modernos al uso, Domènec describe de forma copiosa la dimensión arquitectónica de la colonización sionista de las tierras palestinas que convierten al urbanismo judío en una arma de guerra. Ahora, de algún modo, todo ese bagaje adquirido en la revisión de la modernidad histórica, se pone al servicio de un documentado retrato de uno de los episodios más infames del presente posthistórico perfilado bajo un modelo único. Los últimos trabajos de Domènec, tras esta inflexión, en lugar de conceder el protagonismo a aquello que no aconteció, acentúan su aproximación hacía aquello que, como acción imperativa de supervivencia y de justicia, acontece por encima de las previsiones. Motocarro (2010), una reconstrucción del artefacto con el que el Plácido (1961) de Berlanga intentaba soportar las penurias de la posguerra, circula ahora por las calles de la misma ciudad en las que se rodó la célebre película, pero como un dispositivo móvil puesto a disposición de aquellos que lo requieran y como evocación de otros tantos lugares donde los motocarros continúan simbolizando la respuestas imaginativas a la carencia.

(Exit Express # 45, Junio 2010)

Text for the book Domènec. Real Estate Published by Espai Zero1, Olot 2009

“[…]A curvy wall, not a straight one, should be built.”

Flavio Vegecio Renato, Compendio de técnica militar, segles IV-V

“[…] since the social world is wholly present in each ‘economic’ action, we must resort to instruments of knowledge which, far from questioning the multidimensionality and multifunctionality of practices, enable us to draw up historical models capable of rigorously, minutely explaining the actions and the economic institutions as they are offered to empirical observation. […]”

Pierre Bourdieu, Las estructuras sociales de la economía

“[…] Our blood is outside the law, it can be spilled, we can be killed, massacred, with total impunity.

Yitskhok Katzenelson, Le chant du peuple juif assassiné

“[…] Shadowy shall be the night… scarce the roses.”

Mahmud Darwish, Menos rosas

1. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was created, something very significant has been happening in Palestine which stretches beyond this plot of land and has gradually taken on the air of a transcendental dispute, at least in the Western world. The clash between the antagonists is extremely harsh, and there is increasingly little room for dialogue. Even compassion, if it has ever been present, has wholly disappeared. In this sense, the latest large-scale deployments in Tsahal (regular Israeli army) in both Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and in the Gaza Strip in early 2009 confirm the prevalence of a bellicose logic that makes it very difficult to reach even minimal peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians. The coexistence of these two peoples seems to be eternally condemned to roaring failure. In fact, it is actually an ancient enmity almost a century old whose point of departure was Zionist nationalism’s desire for a return to the hypothetical lost fatherland: the biblical Israel of the Old Testament. When Zionism began to talk about an unpeopled land for a landless people is when the conflicts, of course, began to break out.

As is common knowledge, despite its low population density in the 1940s, Palestine was not exactly an unpeopled land. Under the domain of the British Empire, the Palestinians, most of them Muslim Arabs, already had problems sharing with increasingly numerous groups of Jews from all over the world the scarce, exiguous resources of a place with highly limited productivity. The tone of this conflict grounded in the prevailing scarcity rose after World War II, especially due to the consequences of one of the most horrific episodes associated with war devastation: the Shoah or destruction of the Jewish people in Europe. After having taken such a beating, the Jewish people only had a more zealous desire to tread on that supposed Promised Land. The symbolic charge rose exponentially as the mythical place also effectively became the host to thousands of survivors of the anti-Semitic genocide policy conducted by Nazism. Despite the fact that quantitatively the most significant number of immigrants were Jews from the Near East and North Africa, the arrival of boats overflowing with Jews recently released from the extermination camps and the ghettos scattered around Eastern Europe had – because of the emotional effect prompted by the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis – a foundational meaning. Indeed, in 1948 the state of Israel was born. However, the edification of this new political, administrative and also military entity did not materialise fluidly and peacefully in an unpeopled land, as the more doctrinaire Zionist propaganda heralded it, rather the entire process became yet another story of violence.

Still, the victorious international community consented and even actively contributed to this, especially the United States, when it attached the existence of Israel to its geopolitical interests. Ultimately – and some scholars of the Palestinian plight like Norman G. Finkelstein make well-founded mentions of this – both in the period between the wars and during and after World War II, the use of methods such forcibly displacing people to resolve ethnic conflicts was habitual, and not exactly the subject of condemnation. Despite that apparent, consented normality, what happened was unquestionably a terrible chapter of pain, uprooting and exile that affected a considerable proportion of the local Palestinian population. It was the year of the Nabka (misfortune or catastrophe) as the Palestinians justifiably call it. And in the end, not even all the suffering of the Jews in Europe has managed to offset the trauma caused by the founding of the state of Israel. Some revisionist Israeli historians such as Ilan Pappé have dismantled the founding myth and turned it upside down using solid arguments. The new studies link the newly-found Israeli nationality – apart from the mythological re-creation of a lost past that is present in all the processes of nation-building – to dishonourable episodes of violations of fundamental human rights, and even abominable ones like ethnic cleansing.

2. Therefore, we should consider that the founding of the state of Israel was not only induced by the suffering of Nazi persecution, but that it was a factor that precipitated it and somehow legitimised it. This is true to such an extent that engendering further suffering on the people that had lived and worked in that corner of the Near East for centuries did not initially pose any moral impediment to the Zionist enterprise. In the history of modern Israel, it is very meaningful – because of its controversy and the repercussions linked to it – that the victims – surely the victims par excellence of the 20^th century – have engendered other perennial victims that delegitimize the viability of the state and place it in a constant state of war and mobilisation. From this accumulation of historical circumstances, a state organisation has emerged with certain peculiarities that situate it in the avant-garde, based among other things on the treatment, invention and forging of collective memories and particularly on global capitalism’s latest forms of management and production. Israel is a radical paradox. As historian Régine Robin has pointed out, it is a fragmented, ethnicised, communalised society which at the same time is modern, linked to the development of high technology and the most advanced media, Americanised, globalised like all Western societies. Surely Israel is a privileged place to capture that post-modern ethos where the most rampant modernisation, combined with the most deregulated capitalism, coexists alongside identity and religious elements ruled by unbridled atavism.

As Régine Robin has noted, blindness has prevailed in Israel for some years now. In fact, what reigns in a kind of sentimental and visual indifference that makes it difficult to perceive the Palestinians and their history. Everything has led – and has been accentuated in recent months as bombs have rained down from the skies to the depressed land of Gaza – to a wholly oppressive policy that involves, using the exact words of the author herself, […] transformation of the landscape, destruction of the ancient cities and towns, reconstruction of the towns and creation of other settlements; everything falls within a different symbolic organisation of space, a radical transformation of the toponymy, a straightening of the modern motorways that have nothing to do with the ancient roadways. The goal is to re-create the country, to re-constitute the geography, to re-design the landscape, to ensure not only physical but also symbolic domination. And based on this, later on, the new colonies and settlements, the detours in the networks of conduits and irrigation, the beltways, and the web of territory and the ‘Bantustanisation’ of the occupied territories. […] This is unquestionably a highly accurate description of the climate in which Israeli nationalism has unfolded for a long period of time. According to another historian, Mark Mazower, spatial planning has always played a prime role, plus this nationalism has had inspirational sources whose referent was the German school of economic geography from the between-war period. This is not strange if we bear in mind – as already mentioned – that the belief in the ethnically pure nation-state as a solution to the distribution of the population and resources was the currency of exchange in the cartographic redesigns after the war and in many processes of decolonisation. Therefore, in this sense we could say that the architects of the new state of Israel were not at all singular in using criteria – debatable and human, as demonstrated – already used by many other peoples. Nonetheless, there was one difference: the creation of Israel was a classic act of colonisation at a time when the empires were disintegrating. Given this, it could only have led to conflict, the victims’ tenacious resistance and the weakness of the democratic system.

As a result, this state that is vainglorious about being the only state in the Middle East where a parliamentary system comparable to any other Western country is actually a curious form of democracy. In reality, just like many other issues, Israel is on the cutting edge in terms of a conception of democracy that is increasingly fashionable and characterised by restricting democratic participation, by enshrining individualism and by the pre-eminent role of the elites. Political scientist Sheldon S. Wolin has described it quite accurately using the terminology ‘managed democracy’ and the development of the notion of inverted totalitarianism, which means a connivance between the state organisation, the active, politicised participation of the large corporations and the acritical political passivity of the majority of citizens. In Israel, this phenomenon is largely visible, but with a difference worth highlighting: the degree of military mobilisation which is required by a people drilled based on the cultivation of a culture of fear and external threat. In short, from its very origins it has been a nation at arms against real and potential enemies – the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran and others depending on the point in history – which might endanger its territorial integrity and the survival of its identity.

This situation of constant alert has placed Israel among the ranks of the pioneering countries in the generation of security technologies and action protocols to handle both low-intensity conflicts and open warfare. This technological progress has gained unexpected momentum since 9/11, which, as is common knowledge, ushered in the age of the war against global terrorism. Through America’s unbridled, militarised policy, Israel has amply confirmed its status as a “security” laboratory and testing grounds for the garrison society, as French sociologist Armand Mattelart calls it. As a perfect illustration of this “security” practice, the author himself spotlights the 29-metre tall concrete security fence with electronic alarms, reinforced by trenches and barbed wire in some places, which is expected to run 700 kilometres long, as long as the West Bank’s “green line”, which marks the boundary set in 1967 during the Six-Day War. Yet things are even more serious because as we speak, the construction of the wall now arbitrarily invades the line set as a result of this conflict. The Israeli administration is consciously carrying out an aggressive territorial policy of deeds consummated with the excuse of protecting the Jewish colonies that are located inside the Palestinian occupied territories. With the sophisticated surveillance defences and networks surrounding them, these clusters of homes contribute to illegally expanding Israeli land and reducing the Palestinians’ living space. It is a way of acting that takes into account the perspective of a future partition of Palestine into two states. In this way, Israel, with part of its job already done, would keep the best part of the pie.

As pointed out, one of the priorities of whomever holds the political power in Israel, at least until now, is stressing its modern, Western personality, which means publicising its democratic credentials and public policies, which somehow conceals the chilling scene that is wreaking havoc on Palestinian territory and its displaced inhabitants, as well as those confined to residual areas without no rights whatsoever. These wastelands where the Palestinian people are suffering are a stumbling block that still needing resolution on the planning agenda of a territorial restructuring that Israeli authorities deem unfinished. In fact, the masking manoeuvres in which culture plays an active role are quite inherent to the capitalist West, especially since the 1980s when the large private corporations and the state, in a subsidiary role, forged a close relationship, a link that merges corporate sponsorship with public policy. As a result, according to researcher Chin-tao Wu, this unit connected the arts and culture with the spirit of the free market so highly prized in the Reagan and Thatcher decade. However, not only did it entail this meaningful mutation, rather it also involved, based on the modus operandi in the sacrosanct market, art playing the role of identity-merchandiser and consensus-reacher. Despite this, it should be pointed out that at times, in institutional art policies – both public and private – ambivalence arises that open up avenues where antagonistic discourses with little sympathy for the powers-that-be may circulate.

In such an unedifying juncture as Israel, from the moral standpoint, therefore, it should come as no surprise that cultural and artistic exchanges with other states are promoted, states that in theory are exemplary in relation to the defining parameters of what is considered to be a democracy. In this sense, conducting artistic exchanges could be viewed as a sign of normality, and it was largely based on this pathway that Domènec made his first journey to Israel in 2006. However, as mentioned, there are also cracks within the institution that enable some artists, managers and curators to work from a somewhat critical standpoint and desire for subversion. As can be clearly seen in these projects, Domènec and his Israeli hosts exploited this crack. Likewise, if we bear in mind his career in the past 15 years, it is not surprising that he ended up in Israel.

What stands out with this artist is his work revolving around the crisis in the modern project and the post-modern mutations that have taken place since the last third of the 20^th century. Domènec accomplishes this artistic choice through an increasingly expanded conception of sculpture, with the use of technical devices and diversified presentations in which proto-architectural recycling and the para-documentary process play a predominant role. Therefore, we could state that, by using architecture as a means of approaching metonymics, Domènec has confected a veritable survey of the utopian pretensions of modernity. In this way, situating himself in the terrain of critical post-modernism – which he distinguishes from that lame statement that does nothing other than apologetically intone the undoing of radical humanism and the social propositions that defend equality – he choose to adopt a rebel commitment which, although it questions the limitations of modernity, insists on showing that the inherited order is more the expression of a shipwreck than the rendering of a positive solution to something that is exhausted. In short, his critical position has led him to inquire into the marrow of the potential modern utopia in order to reinterpret and resituate it. That is, his goal is to give it back meaning in the midst of the systemic, fragmented chaos that surrounds it. He has mainly conducted this operation, as mentioned, by exploring the transformational potential and the utopian imagination of modern architecture. In the past, reinterpreted projects by architects like Alvar Aalto, Le Corbussier and Mies van der Rohe, just to name three, have served the artist to bring to light in a very productive, educational way the deficiencies, paradoxes and desires to change contained in polyhedral modern thinking. In this way, his reinterpretations, which are objectually captured in scale models often decontextualised from their original setting and purpose, become the mirrors of a kind of modernity in crisis and of post-modern disorientation, plus after a process of stripping away any pretensions at grandiloquence, they re-launch the utopian modern virtues to apply them in an everyday context.

His journey to Israel, invited to a residence by an Israeli organisation (Jerusalem Center for The Visual Arts) may likely have led him to continue along this avenue of inquiry. In fact, a significant number of architects identified with rationalism ended up building in Israel. Tel Aviv is one of the cities on the planet with the most buildings of this kind. At first, it would not seem contradictory that the place envisioned and so often designated as the Promised Land would end up being the home to a kind of architecture designed to improve humanity’s living conditions, but if we examine the process through which this state was founded, along with its history and current status, the contradiction unfortunately becomes clear. What is more, it is not brazen to state that these paradoxes implicit in modernity take on an unforeseen visibility in each of Israel’s actions in Palestine. Certainly, one of the places on the globe where the humanistic route coupled with the modern discourse has encountered its most striking failure is Israel. For example, we should bear in mind that early on the reality of a Hebrew state had very direct connections with versions of unionism and socialism. Yet, as is known, this did not prevent the forced isolation of many of the Palestinian inhabitants who lived there, and this segregation has not stopped, rather today it is even more accentuated.

Domènec did not remain impassive when confronted with this scene in which the brutalisation of everyday life flourishes. It might have been interesting, but it was not enough for him to just set his scrutinising sights on some emblematic architectural construction. The metonymic speculation about some modern architectural remain amidst so much injustice and barbarism might have taken on the air of a mere formalist exercise, a choice inherent in a kind of inoperative, depoliticised refolding, as Dominique Baqué would say. Domènec, then, saw himself – and kept seeing himself –trapped and enthralled by a living, vibrant universe that exposed the ultimate condition of post-modern policy to plain view. Even further, we could agree with George Arthur Goldshmidt – the journalist cited by Régine Robin in her book on the dynamics of memory in terms of history – that perhaps the very fate of collective Western memory is at stake in this minuscule part of the planet. Without any hesitancy, we must assert that Israel’s warlike, humiliating conduct towards the Palestinian people defames the memory of the Jewish people’s tragedy at the hands of Nazi criminality. As is common knowledge, Auschwitz checkmates the intellectual monument of modernity. But at the same time, the massacres at Sabra or Shatila or the latest bombardments of the depressed Gaza Strip, with all the distinctions and nuances that you will, follow a determination that can only end up feeding the dark universe of barbarism.

Having reached this point, even the arguments used by all those who, from the memory of the Shoah, have made and make the model for erecting a negative criticism of the modern Western way are questioned and lose importance. Obviously, this does not mean that there are no longer reasons to evaluate the modern project with all its latent and visible contradictions – the founding origins of Israel cannot be understood other than in this paradoxical key of modernity – but the real problem arises when that memory of the hurt from the extermination camps becomes an instrument used to justify execrable behaviours. The moral incongruence is lethal, and the victims’ sublimated memory becomes something banal, liturgical and ritual at the service of a cause that consciously ignores the immorality of the means used. The after-effects are a dually outraged modernity and the manipulation of the memory of a crime committed on the Jewish population during the leaden years as a result of the criminal expansion of German imperialism. This episode has left a moving remnant thanks to thousands of witness reports and exceptional literary works such as the long poem written in Yiddish, The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, written by Yitskhok Katzenelson, the spokesman and emblem of the suffering caused by the annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto, who ended up being gassed at Auschwitz. In truth, this is the vast disappointment that overwhelms us as we perceive the testimonial legacy of the Shoah (indisputable humanist cultural edifice) sullied by the often infamous behaviour of the state of Israel. In this sense, and on an individual level, the life story of the Bergen-Belsen camp survivor Hannah Levy-Hass, the mother of the eminent Israeli journalist Amira Hass, is quite meaningful. This woman saw all her worlds collapse: the devastation of the Jewish minority in Europe, the implosion of socialism in her birthplace, Yugoslavia, and finally the huge disappointment of her adopted home, Israel, which whose colonialist character soon reared its head.

For all of these reasons, and without ignoring other aspects already mentioned about the capitalist organisation of production, Israel has this close tie with the condition of post-modernity. Israel-Palestine is therefore a reality and a metaphor of the terrible dead end in which contemporary mankind finds itself. With his trip to the Middle East, Domènec’s artistic oeuvre has undergone a change, but not in the semi-mystical neo-Orientalist sense of reencounter with the deepest essence of his being, rather one that should speak about a re-politicisation of his aesthetic procedures. This transformation, vivid and without signs of having finished, has enabled him to capture the routes through which the political economy and symbolic capital of the latest generation move. As a result, the journey, more accurately, the different sojourns, in Palestine, far from being well-intentioned cultural tourism, have helped him to even further fine-tune his artistic procedure, which has shifted, by shedding light on the deficiencies of modernity, to reveal the dysfunctions of the post-modern period in a specific place.

3. Even though we are living in an age in which the act of travelling has degenerated into a frivolous, consumer activity, it is also true that some people extract fascinating lessons that they then process in creative and knowledge-based acts that may have a public, general interest. The British playwright, David Hare, is one of them. His monologue Via Dolorosa was written after a stay in Israel and the Palestinian territories in 1997. It is a quick, ironic work as confirmed by this excerpt: “There is nothing that prepares you for the physical shock of entering to Gaza. A writer said that to go from Israel to the Gaza Strip by car is like going from California to Bangladesh. You get so used to wide highways and the easy sensuality of Israel that it is the vision of dust, a sudden dust, a giant, brown storm of real filth that warns you that you’re about to enter a society where people earn exactly 8% of what their counterparts in Israel earn. […]” Without a doubt, this impressionistic description clearly shows the drama and deterioration in the disputed Palestine. Without going to Gaza yet developing an intense work halfway between detective work and the situationist drift of the divided city of Jerusalem and the occupied territories on the West Bank, Domènec, in turn, has managed to convey to us the disturbing nature that the Israeli economic and political project has taken on recently. As is common in his oeuvre, with an austere exercise in style surmounted by critical distance and irony, he shapes a dissident portrait whose innovativeness shapes an effective, accessible critique.

In order to examine what he sets out to do – we have already mentioned that this time he is not working around any specific, authorial architectural paradigm – the procedure with which he has deployed his aesthetic re-appropriation has borne in mind three vertexes of Israeli society: security and war, the fact of living associated with an economy with highly singular colonial features, as we shall see, and finally the victims and their memory. It is clear that the expository approach entails a prior disorientation which, however, is transmuted into a brilliant instrument of critical reflection. The vague re-creation of a real estate office, with its hypothetical promotional materials, might seem like a provocation when examining the reality of a society in such upheaval. However, the artist’s incursion into everyday life makes it clear that there is no neutral economic activity; rather that it always responds to the intense presence of the social world, as Pierre Bourdieu stressed.

In the case of Israel-Palestine, given the gravity of the conflict, the very fact of inhabiting and situating oneself in the territory – even though this holds true everywhere – takes on a much stronger political connotation, and even becomes an act of colonialist violence with odious consequences for the vast, disadvantaged Palestinian majority. Domènec presents it ironically in order to get us to grasp it, but real life is much worse. It is cynical, and there is nothing hindering the fact that real estate ads appear in the Israeli press showing homes located inside the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. The sale of these homes is possible, and what is more, is encouraged as yet another tool in Israel’s dominance strategy. However, putting into practice everyday questions like the gradual entrenchment of these settlements of colonisers who view themselves of pioneers in a messianic cause and, furthermore making it viable, requires the assumption of an extreme security-based policy that has catastrophic after-effects in civil society. It is democratic restriction without any stops on it, which unfortunately confers on it an exemplary role. Naomi Klein has expressed what this prominent Israeli role in the global security race consists of in crystal clear terms. About this matter, the Canadian analyst said the following: in South Africa, Russia and New Orleans, the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this process a step further: it builds walls to encircle the dangerous poor. As Naomi Klein states, this is the best exponent of disaster capitalism. In no way it is anti-capitalist rhetoric. For example, quite recently, a project was unveiled in the city of Rio de Janeiro that will consist of erecting a large wall around the impoverished neighbourhoods known as favelas.

This latter definition appealing to disaster fits in perfectly with everything that Domènec captures and shows us through the materials that complement and give meaning to his purported real estate office. First, a fragmented documentary – far from the linearity of television’s visual narrative – expanded into four thematic propositions that reflect the civil and territorial rupture and therefore the impossibility – despite the existence of Jewish leftist activists who seek an alternative route to reconciliation – of instilling a certain degree of social cohesion in view of the inexorable advance of a kind of communitarianism that is grounded on inequality and exploitation. This last word is gradually losing weight because, ever since the arrival of the Jews from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Palestinian population is no longer considered productive, and herein lies the singularity of late Israeli colonialism. Treated as a bothersome residue, they are displaced and locked up in vast prisons, the occupied territories themselves, and their presence becomes the essential pretext – by maintaining a ongoing, low-intensity conflict – for driving a prosperous security industry. Despite the disaster, the economy’s growth rates are vast, comparable, according to Naomi Klein, to those of China and India. The latent state of war is the backbone of Israeli capitalism. Maintaining this climax of tension is expressed, according to Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, in the unstable balance between the suspended everyday violence (that is, the sure yet hidden threat of a hypothetical use of force) and the spectacular violence that the media pay no heed to which is applied in certain situations in which the oppressed people’s resistance is heightened. What is more, thanks to the planet-wide extrapolation of the state of exception promoted recently by the US administration of former President G.W. Bush, the benefits have only risen.

Next is a special edition, a kind of publication inspired by real estate advertising supplements, which Domènec turns into a catalogue that documents and photographically verifies what is in fact a segmented society imprisoned in unscrupulous economic dynamics: Jewish settlements in the Arab and Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, the Wall of Shame being built, demolished Palestinian houses, refugee camps, Jewish colonies in the occupied territories, bothersome checkpoints, the remains of old Palestinian towns dating from before 1948. In short, the strident declaration that the prevailing sectors in Israel have chosen the route of a futuristic fortress that views itself as capable of ensuring its survival and primacy despite being surrounded by enemies and chaos, and the indignant humiliation that it causes. Suffering is the business: surveillance technologies, security companies, more privatisation and restrictions in social services, the weapons industry and the construction of a sinuous, undulating wall that is ready to shape – and offensively penetrate when it needs to – the territory of the population considered left over and unproductive.

4. A song by composer Kurt Weill mentions a supposed utopia, called Youkali, which is supposed to be a haven of happiness and pleasure, the country of our fondest wishes that fades away when we realise that it has only been a dream, a fleeting folly. In Israel, the madness is not fleeting; it is chronic and negative, plus it aims to achieve a degenerate utopia which could well be embodied in the enigmatic name of Baladia. In the middle of the Negev Desert, Tsahal and the United States army are experimenting with counterinsurgency fighting techniques in the streets and homes of a simulated city, Baladia, which is a precise replica of a Palestinian town. This is the workshop, the incubator of companies from the security age. Unfortunately, Israel-Palestine is heading towards extreme polarisation: first the city-citadel, and secondly the proliferation of gigantic segregationist ghettos in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Lebanese writer Elias Khoury drove it home when he wrote that the Israeli politicians in charge of confinement via military force are not only forgetting the history of their own people’s oppression rather they seem to have actually decided to identify with their murderers and make the Palestinians become the Jews’ Jews. This play on words is not exactly a diversion; rather it is a bloody reality which Domènec has examined with Sàgar Malé in a sober, convincing way in the stills of the videographic work 48_Nakba. Indeed, five interviews with Palestinians who have lived in squalor in refugee camps inside their own country – what a paradox to be exiled in one’s own home – reflect the marginalisation of an entire people and the attempt to annihilate their culture and identity, a form of destruction that is conducted on a daily basis by executing a systematic plan whose goal is to erase all referents that might give the hope of maintaining in the present ties to the lost recent past. However, there is more than that, as there is evidence of aggression and physical mutations on the Palestinian geography through a process of dispossessing the resources whose only destination is capitalist accumulation. This is a sort of spatial reorganisation, using the terminology of geographer David Harvey, which is materialised under neo-conservative political guidelines targeted at imposing a territorial logic of order and control, and under the economic impetus driven by the liberal privatisation of a place where there is not an abundance of resources. Water, for example, is an explicit case of this. All in all, it offers the security-military complex vast opportunities, and it is legitimised with the mask sculpted by the discourse revolving around combat against purported Palestinian terrorism – whose actions at time also entail a violation of fundamental human rights – otherwise already included in the global catalogue of the Axis of Evil.

One could say that the incursion into Israel-Palestine signalled the addition of a variation in Domènec’s artistic oeuvre. That is, the fact of resizing the rationalistic architectural political and philosophical paradigm by subjecting it to a strategy of dismantlement as a way of accessing a stripped-down analysis of the insufficiencies of modernity is joined by an attitude more commonly found in an agitator – which does not mean that it is any less complex or reflexive. This gesture becomes clear in the prominent role granted to human relations and in the establishment of connections with the social and political milieu that does not accept a present tainted with opprobrium and oppression. Domènec’s foray – somewhere between urbanistic investigation, sociology and cultural anthropology – has not gone in the direction of constituting artificial forms of social life as in the majority of propositions from relational aesthetics; rather its purpose is to documentarily show us the vestiges of an archaeology of what might be a widespread future, with fear and violence as the underpinnings of the social order. Israel-Palestine is a very credible example of the obscurity that our future might embrace, and at the same time this binomial has already taken on tragic proportions deriving from the lament for the perversity that the human condition can harbour within it. That is, the unease that seeps out from the fact, as Eva Figes pointed out in her novel-essay, that the victimism of the Jewish population may justify acts that produce more victims. What should have been a moral referent for humanity, the Holocaust, runs the risk of losing its dignity and becoming a mere propaganda tool in the falcon-like talons of the state of Israel.

With regard to the situation in the United States, which, we should recall, often acts as both a sounding board and a pole of influence on official Israeli stances, historian Peter Novick has warned about these simplifying banalisations which, in his opinion, are closely related to the closing of the ranks of the Jews in the United States and the fact that they have gradually drifted to the right in politics. This has led them to adulterate and distort the cultural weight of the tragedy linked to the Nazi death camps. Without a doubt, the recent Israeli governments’ policies towards the Palestinians put up further hurdles to the possibility of keeping this humanist reference universal. The combination of racial identity and religion with state-of-the-art technologies makes Israel the breeding grounds par excellence of the post-modern ethos. Nonetheless, in accordance with everything said until now, within post-modernity there is also room for critical dissidence and resistance, even in the Palestinian places where roses no longer abound, as Mahmud Darwish’s verse says. Domènec already travelled along this pathway of resistance some time ago, and for this reason it is no coincidence that his aesthetic, so appropriate for these times of urgency, has operated in Israel-Palestine.

In short, to conclude I would only like to add that despite the fact that some authors continue to stress it – especially within the Jewish cultural world itself – it no longer makes much sense to calibrate whether or not founding the state of Israel in Palestine in 1948 is relevant. The reality of the present imposes itself, and therefore the most important objective is to make that plot of land inhabitable for both peoples. The difficulties are vast, perhaps insurmountable, but the only way is a deepening of democracy coupled with a transformation in the socioeconomic model – which, on the other hand, is only possible it if takes place in parallel on the global scale – and the complicity of the pacifist and more progressive sectors on both sides. A continuation of the option of force will lead to a cataclysm. Have the powers-that-be in Israel thought about – as Peggy Anderson suggests – what might happen if the Arab countries in the Near East shake off the American neo-imperialist domination one day? It is likely that Palestinian captivity would cease to exist as we know it today. At the same time, it is virtually certain that the opportunity to redefine a country with room for democracy and secularism would have been squandered. As is palpable every day, Israel’s radical nationalist and extremely neo-conservative social actions are the best fuel for their most fundamentalist, reactionary adversaries. In the end, the fact that the state of Israel is determined to forge ahead with the security paradigm and disaster capitalism cannot be anything but an evil omen. It is the most transparent expression of the very fragility to which it is exposed.

Bibliography cited and used

ANDERSON, Perry, “Precipitarse hacia Belén”, New Left Review, issue 10, pp. 5-29.

ARIAS, Juan, “Un muro rodeará las favelas de Río”, El País, 29^th of March 2009.

AZOULAY, Ariella/OPHIR Adi, “The Monster’s Tail”, translation of an excerpt from the lecture “The Politics of Humanitarianism in Occupied Territories”, delivered at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute (20^th and 21^st of April 2004).

BAQUÉ, Dominique, Pour un nouvel art politique. De l’art contemporain au documentaire, París, Éditions Flammarion, 2004.

BOURDIEU, Pierre, Las estructuras sociales de la economía, Barcelona, Editorial Anagrama, 2003.

DARWISH, Mahmud, Menos rosas, Madrid, Ediciones Hiperión, 2006.

FINKELSTEIN, Norman G., Imagen y realidad del conflicto palestino-israelí, Madrid, Ediciones Akal, 2003.

FIGES, Eva, Viaje a ninguna parte, Barcelona, Edhasa, 2008.

FLAVIO VEGECIO RENATO, Compendio de técnica militar, Madrid, Ediciones Cátedra, 2006.

HARE, David, Via dolorosa, Barcelona, Columna Edicions, 2003.

HARVEY, David, El nuevo imperialismo, Madrid, Ediciones Akal, 2003.

KATZENELSON, Yitskhok, Le chant du peuple juif assassiné, París, Zulma, 2007

KHOURY, Elias, “Los judíos de los judíos”, El País, 16^th of January 2009.

KLEIN, Naomi, La doctrina del shock. El auge del capitalismo del desastre, Barcelona, Ediciones Paidós, 2007.

LADDAGA, Reinaldo, Estética de la emergencia, Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2006.

LEVY-HASS, Hanna, Diario de Bergen-Belsen 1944-1945 (Prologue by Amira Hass), Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, 2006.

MATTELART, Armand, Un mundo vigilado, Barcelona, Ediciones Paidós, 2009.

MAZOWER, Mark, El imperio de Hitler, Barcelona, Editorial Crítica, 2008

NOVICK, Peter, Judíos, ¿vergüenza o victimismo? El Holocausto en la vida americana, Madrid, Marcial Pons Ediciones, 2007.

NÚÑEZ VILLAVERDE, Jesús A., “Todo empezó en Baladia”, El País, 16^th of January 2009.

PAPPÉ, Ilan, La limpieza étnica de Palestina, Barcelona, Editorial Crítica, 2008.

RABKIN, Yakox M., La amenaza interior. Historia de la oposición judía al sionismo, Hondarribia, Editorial Hiru, 2006.

ROBIN, Régine, La mémoire saturée, París, Éditions Stock, 2003.

WOLIN, Sheldon S., Democracia S.A. La democracia dirigida y el fantasma del totalitarismo invertido, Madrid, Katz Editores, 2008.

WU, Chin-tao, Privatizar la cultura, Madrid, Ediciones Akal, 2007.

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

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.

text from Existenzminimum, Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani, Girona 2002

La position d’un agent dans l’espace social s’exprime dans le lieu de l’espace physique où il est situé (celui dont on dit qu’il est “sans feu ni lieu” ou “sans domicile fixe” n’a –quasiment– pas d’existence social) […]

Pierre Bourdieu, La misère du monde.

Presentation 1

Someone is walking aimlessly in the middle of a leafy wood. We cannot see him, we can only detect his passage by the movements of the branches and the sound of his footsteps. The rustling of the vegetation as it is torn and broken by the weight of the invisible walker can be heard faintly, but it is so incessant that it produces a feeling of anguish. The persistent action of the passer-by places us in an unnerving situation. As we gradually become aware that in the images we cannot identify anyone in particular, our insecurity increases to such an extent that the impossibility of distinguishing any sign of individuality creates a great uneasiness. In fact, the contemplation of the walk through the wood is not pleasant for us because, on the one hand, we are faced with something which implies a loss and, on the other, because it alludes to a displacement undertaken without the suitable provisions. Nowhere is there anything to suggest to us that the passer-by will find a clearing in the thicket which will make his situation more bearable. On the contrary, the behaviour of this enforced nomad –who acts as a kind of mediating self, and therefore extends its needs to others (us)–, which refers us to a setting of helplessness and exclusion, becomes a revealing symptom of the ideological and cultural crisis which the modern narratives with a desire for emancipation are undergoing at the present time. Habitar sense deixar rastre (Inhabiting without leaving traces) is a videographic work by Domènec to which these brief impressions belong. Filled with an ambiguous lyricism, it announces the construction of a powerful parabola of our contemporaneity, more determined than ever by the dangers of globalization, or to be more exact, by those of capitalist universalization¹.

Friedrichsfelde Cemetery of Berlin: a history of the twentieth century

At the beginning of February, 1919, the political programme of the Spartacus Group was published in the pages of the Spanish newspaper El socialista². It consisted of a posthumous homage –almost in real time– to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, principal leaders of the proletarian revolution in Germany during the winter of 1918-1919, which had had important international resonance. Both of them, together with hundreds of other supporters of the revolution, had been the victims of the brutal homicide by the parapolice forces at the service of the Ministry of the Interior headed by Noske, a member of the right wing of the social democracy. In the year 1999, in a Germany completely under the spell of the democratic market plays, six thousand people gathered in the Friedrichsfelde of Berlin around a monolith inscribed with the significant words: “The dead warn us”. That ceremony, which consisted of a homage to Rosa Luxemburg eighty years after her death, reactivated the myth and connected it to the rebellious spirit of the alternative social movements of the reunified German society. In this way, the memory did not only return, but rather it clashed with the unhappiness of the present, with the moment of danger evoked by Walter Benjamin³. In the middle of this long period, the passage of time and political convulsions had wiped out significant moments of the past. In short, the discontinuous continuity of the History of the vanquished had become apparent.

In fact, in the year 1926 in this same location –which in 1946 became a posteriori a place in memory of the “really existing socialism” of the extinct German Democratic Republic– commissioned by the KPD (German Communist Party) Mies van der Rohe had erected a funerary monument to honour these leaders of the workers. Nothing remains of the austere and moving work by the famous architect in the Friedrichsfelde. As is well-known, when Adolf Hitler became the new chancellor in 1933, this unique construction of rationalist architecture was demolished. Without a doubt, one of the unquestionable reasons for this destruction was political animosity. However, this emphasis on sweeping away the traces of the recent past could also be partly explained by the formal defiance suggested by Mies van der Rohe’s block of resistant bricks to the neohistoricist architectural aesthetics of Nazism. On the other hand, the asymmetrical forms which recalled constructivist sculpture did not greatly interest the new socialist bureaucracy which achieved control of the state in the eastern half of Germany at the end of the Second World War. The reconstruction of the monument to Liebknecht and Luxemburg was put aside and a place of remembrance was designed where concentrations of the masses could be orchestrated from above, with the propagandist objective of emphasising rhetorically the collective nature of the working-class struggle. Then was not the opportune moment –at the height of sovietising German communism– to evoke former illustrious individuals. Especially in this case, in which those who were paid homage did not fit into the Stalinist orthodoxy. In this way, the memorial stone and a group of headstones and urns with the names of the martyrs of the revolution and the struggle against fascism became the symbol of the unification –forced and traumatic– of the SPD (Social Democratic Party) and the KPD (Communist Party) into the new institutionalized party, the SED⁴.

Presentation 2

A lorry carrying a prefabricated mobile home is driving along the road. We do not know its destination nor do we have any way of discovering it. The videographic montage in loop suggests some-thing endlessly provisional. The anxiety induced by the man in the middle of the vegetation we find once again in Sans domicile fixe, another of Domènec’s works. The monotonous harsh and strident sound of the lorry engine intensifies our uneasiness to the point of having to turn our eyes away from the moving image. As there is no enclave which refers us to an origin, nor, what is worse, a place of arrival, it represents that historical time has disappeared.

By a studied simplicity of means, Domènec evokes one of the fundamental cultural features of our time. However, the metaphorical gesture of the artist contains two implications. In the first case, it may seem that he only bears witness to the tedious and worn out (anti)thought of the end of the ideologies, of History or of the great stories which usually involve the celebration of a “continuous present” associated with the inevitable deterritorialization of the subject. In this sense, even though the truth of the hegemony of the post thought is reflected, it is necessary to affirm that in this visual confirmation Domènec does not descend to the levels of paralysing scepticism. On the contrary, and this is the second implication, Sans domicile fixe does manifest an affliction, a great uncertainty because it is evident that the “continuous present” is nothing more than a mystification which hides the fact that the “living present”⁵ is in no way as self-sufficient as it seems. After all, History has not finished,⁶ and we are witnessing an “advancement” which is obvious enough in daily life: the unquestionable and universal consolidation of globalized neoliberalism.

Existenzminimum: critical readaptation and signs of resistance

In an already considerable part of his evolution as an artist, Domènec has worked around the great architectural paradigms of Modernity. Works such as 24 hores de llum artificial (1998-1999), Un lloc (2000), Ici même (dins de casa), Domèstic (2001), in which there was a very careful re-elaboration of a critical-poetical universe around the highly symbolic constructions of the architects Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier, made evident the capacity of the artist to identify architecture as a “political unconsciousness” of Modernity. That is, as Walter Benjamin⁷ already noticed, the projects of the architects-artists would constitute the best incarnation of all those dreams of a Modernity powerless to fulfil its promises of progress and well-being for everyone. In this same sense, with his recreation of a room in the sanatorium of Paimio of Alvar Aalto or the replica made to scale of the Unité d’Habitation of Le Corbusier, Domènec demonstrated the contrast between the proposals of the architectural utopias for inhabiting the world in better conditions and the reality of a Modernity imprisoned by the fetishism of merchandise driven by the “real capitalism”, or in another of his versions –as Modernity is not univocal and neither is Post-Modernity–, lost forever after having undertaken the construction of a false socialist “paradise”.

In Existenzminimum (minimum existence), out-wardly, the artist has worked in a similar direction. In fact, the two videographic productions, presented in this same text and also forming part of the exhibition, offer a reliable diagnosis of the consequences of the crisis of values of Modernity, like the works which take Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier as their greatest reference. Certainly, in both the earlier productions and Existenzminimum an accurate use of the possibilities arising from the expansion and explosion of the field of sculpture⁸ can be observed, and everything this phenomenon has involved during the last two decades as far as the revaluation of the commonplace, the validity of micronarrations and the relevance of the procedural factor in the work of art.

However, despite the existence of many coincidences in the creative process, in the project Existenzminimum, the artist operates with a more interventionist attitude on the real world. To understand this it is necessary to return to the Friedrichsfelde cemetery, because it is there that Domènec began his performance, when he recovered the traces and fragmentary ruins of the “unconscious politician” of the former monument by Mies van der Rohe. Even so, we are not attending an “archaeological” and artificial re-construction of the original mausoleum. Quite the contrary, the work carried out by the artist provides us with a new construction which is made obvious in the prototype of the mobile home inspired in the commemorative work of the architect. This strange house possesses certain extraordinary symbolic characteristics. In its fragility are fused the revision of the concept of “minimum existence” –debated in the CIAM congress of architecture of Frankfurt in 1929, to establish universal guidelines to make a fitting home possible for everyone– and the importance of the return of the tragic traversed by violence. As a result, Domènec creates a gimmick which, starting from the critical readaption, becomes a mechanism loaded with political significance. Obviously this affirmation does not mean that the new artefact contains implicit programmed or pamphleteering instructions. On the contrary, we find ourselves with a work of extreme sensitivity and depth of historic thought which condenses a tragic-poetic-political conception of real experience. Therefore, the irony with depolarising pretensions –which also hides a political operation– so characteristic of some critical attempts, which in a frivolous way focus on the collapse of modern utopias, is not Domenèc’s choice. This does not mean, however, that he renounces to playful approaches to bring about symbolic influences in a concrete place and to produce an interference in real time. In this sense, the action carried out in Girona, which consisted of placing the nomadic home “Mies van der Rohe-Domènec” in the middle of Devesa Park so that a group of people could carry out the tasks of daily life out in the open, is an example of this striving for a playful spirit, of situationist re-miniscences. The uncertainties of the game can also be a subversive defiance to the system of rules and regulations which governs our lives. Nevertheless, as we have insisted before, Existenzminimum gives off a much higher content of allegorical potentials, which are demonstrated in the exhibition space, starting from a symbiosis which is created between the powerful presence of the microarchitecture and the (post) performance exhibition on a monitor of the action taking place in Devesa Park⁹.

We have commented that a greater degree of interference towards the real world could be seen in Existenzminimum. Without a doubt, that is not by chance, if we take into account that the inspirational source of the project had a strong political connotation. A strange work in the evolution of Mies van der Rohe, a man little inclined to demonstrating an explicit militancy in public. Even so, the monument of blocks arranged at different heights and depths and fashioned from thousands of industrial bricks, which symbolize the unity of a mass of people10, is an extraordinary example of poetical potential applied to politics. In a time like the present, in which the beginnings of a false neoliberal totality, which could well be qualified, as Pierre Bourdieu indicated¹¹, as “progressist” restoration –granted that it shows what is considered a regression as a form of progress–, are hegemonic, the signs of resistance discovered in Existenzminimum are extremely suggestive. This discovery is possible thanks to a line of work that is fully conscious of the fact that during the twentieth century Modernity was not created as a block without cracks. The same short history of the Friedrichsfelde reveals to us its polyhedral nature, and in addition, warns us that it housed strong counteraccounts which allow critical remodernizations. In fact, by now the revival of certain proposals which question the neoliberal global order, for instance, show the effectiveness of performances of this sort. In this way, and taking these factors into account, it is relevant to state that from the (de)monumentalization of the work of Mies van der Rohe, Domènec has carried out a symbolic assembling of utopian remains on small scale in order to reintroduce them into a social landscape in which the great majority are exposed to the elements. Also, we cannot forget that this entire creative process is impregnated with an acute critical sense and a vigorous poetic intensity.

In this inclemency, which implies a philosophical orphanage to interpret the world from subalternity, Domènec’s nomadic home becomes a deleuziana war machine¹², which seeks to occupy and fill this space-time framed by continuous displacements¹³ of post-Fordian capitalism in areas of difficult categorization and identification. These are places which allow the dominant system to evade disapproval and at the same time, in a paradoxal manner, to subvert the existing order by means of its reproduction. Even though the artist –like the majority of present-day criticism– shares with the hegemonic directives of capitalism, details of the representation of the world which have come from displacements, this option does not come from a non-critical acceptation of the iconography of discontinuity, of the fragment or of deterritorialization, nor of a “glamorous” vision of the homeless¹⁴ as the only subject in a position to achieve social change. After all, one thing is the image which capitalism creates of itself and the other is the unity which reigns in the upper levels of the system. In spite of this, this appearance has some real effects on everyday life. It is in the gaps of this ordinary normality –mediatized by the mythicized delocalization– where the artist places his construction metaphorically. This manoeuvre is enlightening. The nomadic home, as if it were a precarious tank¹⁵, provides the tools for adaptation in hostile surroundings: mobility, relative speed and the covering its armour offers in the open. However, in parallel, the symbolism of its “bunkerized” forms becomes a cry of alarm. As we have said, displacements are not univocally ideal, and therefore, they can also contain elements of danger in becoming a false movement towards nowhere, in stagnation, like a prison.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari¹⁶, showed that a work of art could also become –like the antisystem movements– a potential war machine in the sense that it can draw a line of creative escape. In Existenzminimum, Domènec has known how to find this path by inventing new time-spaces –self-construction, parasitic architecture and the creation of small spontaneous communities…– which are events that defy the mercantilist displacements of “real capitalism” and, at the same time, follow a ground where the signs of future prints are visualized. In short, a contribution to the daily struggle to construct a horizon of hope. Habitar sense deixar rastre, Sans domicile fixe and Existenzminimum are works which collect the fruit of tightening the limits of Modernity in a precise operation of intellectual recycling and “protoarchitectural bricolage”. By this action, Domènec has achieved a profound reflection on aesthetics which can correspond to the resistance¹⁷ and, at the same time, has brilliantly re-presented how resistance can be appropriately transformed on the aesthetic plane.

1 Samir Amin, Los desafíos de la mundialización, Mexico, 21st century, 1997.

2 Luis Gómez Lorente, Rosa Luxemburgo y la socialdemocracia alemana, Madrid, Edicusa/Cuadernos para el Diálogo, 1975.

3 Walter Benjamin, “Tesis de filosofía de la historia”, Discursos interrumpidos I, Madrid, Taurus, 1990, p. 180.

4 Peter Reichel, L’Allemagne et sa mémoire, Paris, Éditions d’Odile Jacob, 1998, p. 101.

5 Fredric Jameson, “La carta robada de Marx”, in Michael Sprinker, Demarcaciones espectrales. En torno a Espectros de Marx, de Jacques Derrida, Madrid, Ediciones Akal, 2002, p. 48.

6 Eduardo Grüner, El fin de las pequeñas historias. De los estudios culturales al retorno (imposible) de lo trágico, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2002, p. 55. The author’s observations are inspired by Perry Anderson.

7 Eduardo Grüner, op. cit, p. 158.

8 About this subject see the article published in 1979 by Rosalind Krauss. The Spanish version can be found in Rosalind Krauss, “La escultura en el campo expandido”, Hal Foster (Ed.) La posmodernidad, Barcelona, Kairós, p. 59-74.

9 The text which deals with (post-performance) by Fernando Castro Flórez, “Coses que passen” of the exhibition catalogue (Post)performança i altres esdeniments paradoxals, Girona, Fundació Espais, 2002 is most illustrative.

10 Josep Quetglas, El horror cristalizado. Imágenes del Pabellón de Alemania de Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, Actar, 2001, p. 104-111.

11 Günter Grass-Pierre Bourdieu, “La restauración ‘progresista’”, in New left review, nº 14, 2002, p. 59-74.

12 Gilles Deleuze, Conversaciones, València, Pre-textos, 1995, p. 263-276.

13 Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello, El nuevo espíritu del capitalismo, Madrid, Akal, 2002, p. 599-655.

14 Tom Lewis, “La política de la ‘fantología’ en Espectros de Marx de Derrida”, in Michael Sprinker (Ed.), op. cit. p. 157-197.

15 Heiner Müller, “Le char-personnage et la guerre de nouvement” in Heiner Müller, Alexander Kluge, Esprit, pouvoir et castration. Entretien inèdits (1990-1994), Paris, Éditions Theatrales, 1997, p. 45-49.

16 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mil mesetas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia, Valencia, Pre-textos, 1998, p. 359-431.

17 Knopf, “Esthétique et destruction. La fin des histoires et de l’histoire dans L’Esthètique de la resistance”, a M. Hofman et M-C. Méry (dir.), Littérature, esthétique, histoire, dans l’oeuvre de Peter Weiss, Presses Universitaries de Nancy, 1993, p. 125-135.

(Español)

Aquesta vida és un hospital on cada malalt es desficia per poder canviar de llit. Aquest voldria sofrir cara a l’estufa, i aquell creu que guariria al costat de la finestra. Sempre em sembla que m’haig de trobar bé allà on no sóc, i aquesta qüestió dels canvis de lloc és una de les que discuteixo contínuament amb la meva ànima…El petit poema en prosa de Baudelaire, titulatAny Where out of the World (A qualsevol lloc fora del món) en honor al seu mestre Edgar Allan Poe, sempre m’ha semblat molt a prop de les peces i instal·lacions hospitalàries que Domènec (Mataró, 1962) ha realitzat en els últims anys. Si les seves darreres obres exploraven els espais absents i les formes mòrbides al temps seductores i abjectes, ara el treball que presenta a l’espai de la Sala Montcada de la Fundació “la Caixa” sublima l’estàtica presència del viatge existencial, la fugida vers els països que són analogies de la Mort. Com reclama el poeta a la seva ànima en el text de la capçalera: anem més lluny encara; encara més lluny de la vida, si això és possible: instal·lem-nos al pol. Allà el sol només frega molt obliquament la terra, i les lentes alteracions de la llum i de la nit suprimeixen la varietat i augmenten la monotonia, aquella meitat del no-res…

Una meitat del no-res que l’artista corporitza en la construcció a escala natural d’una cambra del sanatori finès de Paimio, obra de l’arquitecte Alvar Aalto (1933). Un espai on reposa i guareix aquella “ànima morta” de Baudelaire, Kafka, Mann, Beckett, Artaud, Plath o de Bernhard, dels qui prenen llargs banys de tenebres, mentre, per distreure’s en l’etern viatge cap el silenci del nord, admiren les garbes roges de les aurores boreals, els reflexos dels focs artificials de l’Infern!

Una cambra amarada de gèlida llum artificial, lluny del món, un espai per a poder llegir els llibres més bells que Proust sabia escrits en llengua estrangera i on viure l’art com una iniciativa de salut a la manera de Deleuze. Un espai fora del temps que el comissari de l’exposició, Martí Peran, mira A distància –títol del cicle- i que no vol dir altra cosa que mirar el fora des del distanciament, des del dins més entranyat de la blancor neutra de les idees i les paraules: Si amb el pensament volíem atrapar el món, en realitat el llencem lluny del nostre abast. Si amb l’anhel de construir una casa volíem ser en el món, en realitat ens n’amaguem.

Als primers anys trenta l’arquitecte Aalto construí un sanatori anti tuberculós, Domènec ara caracteritza aquella primera intenció racionalista i fragilitza fins a l’extrem la distància entre l’habitabilitat –el confort racional de la modernitat- i la malaltia de l’ésser contemporani –l’exili. L’espectador ha d’entrar dins la cambra, integrar-se a la blancor de la llum artificial, tocar amb els ulls el mobiliari de la sala en la seva metamòrfica i asèptica quietud –peces orgàniques, pròpies de l’autor, que dins la cambra assumeixen l’esperit dels armaris, llits i sanitaris hospitalaris. El factor humà és l’essència de la arquitectura i aquesta esdevé així refugi, el lloc on prendre contacte amb les coses, i entre

aquestes el propi cos, “l’ànima malalta”, el jo i l’altre, en definitiva aquella meitat del no-res. Domènec en les seves obres rebaixa la temperatura natural del món real i l’extraordinària cambra d’aquesta instal·lació –24 hores de llum artificial-, com apunta Martí Peran, “potser ni tan sols ens aixopluga, només és la forma d’un forat que dóna accés a la caiguda”.

Aquesta cambra, disposada dins l’altra cambra expositiva, ella mateixa dins la cambra d’una ciutat, potser talment l’escenari on reviure el darrer moment del diàleg entre el malalt baudelerià i la seva ànima; quan aquesta exhausta de preguntes i silencis, de propostes de viatges i territoris més benignes on guarir-se i deixar de complaure’s en el seu mal, exclama desesperada i cridant: Anem…¡A qualsevol lloc! ¡A qualsevol lloc! ¡La qüestió és que sigui fora del món!

Pilar Bonet

Nowhere, in rhetorical terms, means belonging to modernity, the utopian space. Situated always beyond the horizon, in perpetual transformation, nowhere may never be reached; in reality, this is no destination, but rather a dream to stretch the present, so today isn’t today either, but rather an episode controlled by nowhere. It has been rather vehemently stated that contemporaneity, to a certain extent, represents the moment modern beings joined adulthood, a place where they will no longer be subjected obediently to the hopeful future events which have entranced them so far. From this viewpoint, this account referring to nowhere has been one of the first to lose credibility. It is here and now where the sense of experience should be established; yet, of course, the present itself, due to the aforementioned modern inheritance, has no real contingence, either. This is no solid place, capable of being the foundation of a project, but rather any place – right here. These are the latest news reports to arrive from nowhere, those placing it, indifferently, Ici même.

Ici même (Dins de casa), (Right Here (At Home)) one of the latest projects conceived by Domènec, comprises the full range of problems gliding in the background of his works in recent years; In this direction, we meet again with his insistent critical visits paid to modern paradigms – above all in the line of architecture – to show in these their weakness; but, besides, it may seem possible for us to see a highly important added value in this project between the lines of this: the chance to formulate the same objections and reprimands aimed at modernity on top of the outline of the post experience. The result is an overwhelming harshness: contemporaneity is no longer both the conquered freedom placed upon the denouncement of modern myths, and simple acceptance of the lack of such itself, but now has no camouflage. Contemporary experience is thus the bloody paradox which turns freedom into an oppressive condition.

Let us make the proposal of advancing orderly to approach all these issues. First, let us attempt to highlight the real thread of Domènec’s latest projects: a review of modern models with an attitude of simultaneous fascination and deconstruction; later we shall be in more optimum conditions to verify to what extent the work titled Ici même (Dins de casa), despite Le Corbusier’s significant quotation, where the real contemplation revolves around the post-modern alternatives, which, as was mentioned earlier, far from modifying the analysis concerning modern news reports, enables us to highlight the same type of lacking even more.

1.

As has been noted widely and in vastly different areas, contemporary culture has been practically forced to substitute the principle of genuine creation or production, for reading and interpretation. All speech preserves the gossip of a previous text which turns it into a simple reading; and this, far from contributing to strengthen the presence of the original text as the hard core of language, what it has awoken is the awareness of the rhetorical nature of all languages. So – and I do not wish to insist on its description as it has been widely thematised – this has provoked especially dangerous reactions – at the cost of deculturalisation due to neo-theologies – those developed on a pluralist note. What I mean is that it is not odd in the least to come face to face with postulates, according to which, given their condition of being simple remarks from all discourses, no linguistic act is therefore a speech strong enough and interesting enough to be taken into consideration. Everything is permissible in the name of a malicious tolerance which, in actual fact, hides the apolitical message whereby nothing is important enough.

Naturally, the only possible reaction to this relativism and eclectic-like pluralism typical of the worst postmodernism, should not be able to consist of rescuing the myth from certain universal categories; Though it should, despite accepting the soft nature of thought, attempt to separate which texts are more interesting than others so as to, by reconsidering them, write a note-book of the present. In this difficult tessitura, contemporary culture has spoken out unequivocally and gone much farther beyond the innocuous aforementioned pluralism. These have been perfectly conscientious decisions, for example, to reread the philosophy from the school of suspicion as an alternative to the invitations to remain in the wake of metaphysics; or dislocate the tradition of architecture from the rationalist register with all the power of pre-modern architecture; or dampen the optimism of the visual avant-garde with the deconstruction of its illusions or, among many other operations, rescue as prototypically modern the pure literature which grows under the shadow of Flaubert or Mallarmé and even Robert Walser. It is precisely because of the direction of all these decisions that the short-sighted analysts from the academia have «discovered» that the real genealogy of post-modernity lies at the heart of modern culture. We have already mentioned this above: it may not be really such new and strident –almost frivolous- post-modernity, but actually a current modern inexpressive present in the modern-post style.

Domènec’s work in recent years should be interpreted, above all, from this perspective. It is true that his work – and even more so if we add all his earlier works with a more object-like nature to his latest projects –can also be read easily while exercising the traumatising of minimalist tradition, but this key to the reading, if it is developed, leads us to certain conclusions which are close to those earlier co-ordinates of interpretation. Minimalism, indeed, has been revisited by contemporary art with the aim of showing that all that purity and ideal concerning neutrality was an illusion which could be cracked with absolute ease if one began to put those hypothetical cases in their place as pure objects in the context of social, historical or narrative order. And what is more important and odd about all this process is that contemporary art has recovered all these parameters (such as research concerning reality, history or fiction) as if they were the fundamental ingredients of its speculation, precisely due to contemplating and reconsidering minimalist objects. To say this somewhat more directly: when the minimalist tradition erects a neutral aesthetic object, thus a series of strategies is set up to reconsider the conditions of reality of that object and in the deployment of these strategies the basic map of contemporary art is drawn up.

The more or less intermittent references made by contemporary culture in the architecture of the modern movement, of course, must be read from the post situation which critically assesses emancipating utopias given the fact that architecture, due to its obvious condition, represents the most elaborate model of those aims; but it is also true that, in the world of contemporary art, the use of modern architecture must be interpreted with an added value: it also represents a strategy for submitting the aims of minimalism to the conditions of reality. It is in this way that two lines of research are built rather easily which, despite the obvious differences, in reality, bear a powerful relationship …In any case –from one way or the other, or from the whole of both as Domènec’s work could be represented –this appeal to the modern movement’s architecture acts as reliable proof regarding the hierarchy of certain accounts so as to feed the remarks which constitute the present.

In Domènec’s case, this reading of the modern tradition of architecture is clearly visible; Alvar Aalto is clearly present in 24 hores de llum artificial (Twenty-four hours of artificial light) and Le Corbusier in Un lloc (A Place) and the aforementioned Ici même (dins de casa). The direction of this review also becomes directly explicit: on turning the warm and comfortable interiors of a hospital in Paimio into an artificial and unbreathable space; or when reducing such a paradigm as l’unité d’habitation into a piece of furniture in an impersonal room or into the motive of an advertising image, the whole of modern utopia is reduced to a nightmare. All these pieces are, above any other consideration, the construction of specific areas; but it is obvious that the foundations of these works finish up in this harrowing irony – in the Beckett-like nature we have mentioned on earlier occasions – with which the reference point of modern architecture is used.

In the case of the latest work, Ici même (dins de casa), the creation of a willingly equivocal climate around the work of Le Corbusier is highly emphasised. Firstly, in the meaning of the firmness that unhesitatingly turning the most optimistic and humanist aims of modernity– and l’unité d’habitation is such – into a vulgar advertising message; but the crudeness is emphasised even more so if we add to this pitifully insignificant new condition of the alleged canon, by turning it into archaeological remains, a remote ruin swallowed up by nature.

Modern aims of fitting out a truly inhabitable place, embedded in the projects of Aalto or Le Corbusier, are damaged in their contemporary deconstruction, highlighting the fact that they merely serve to provide a promise of a useless future for the experience of here and now.

2.

In a general and indeed panoramic way, this same recrimination towards the modern movement based on an excessively anticipatory conception of architecture – whereby it was supposed that certain previous formal guidelines should be enough to guarantee the happiness coming from the experience to be developed inside these shapes – is what has led research on contemporary architecture to the land of the event, of the greatest versatility of shapes and functions and, even, to the more or less explicit recovery of clearly pre modern notions and types – the idea of the picturesque or pavilions – leaning more towards the conception of architecture as an available space, of a flexible nature, capable of acting like a container of situations, experiences and multiple uses. Ici même (dins de casa), as we have attempted to explain, is a project which, along the lines as the earlier works made and based on Alvar Aalto or Le Corbusier himself, clearly exemplifies that critical conclusion of modern items; but way beyond this, it highlights a review up to the contemporary alternatives themselves. In the first instance, and given the fact that it involves a life-size bus shelter for waiting at a station, the project is offered as a space for occasional use, absolutely ephemeral and concerning wasted time; on the other hand, its hypothetical use leads us to mobility and covering distances; from another register, we could even interpret this peculiar area as a kind of pavilion in the same perspective we mentioned before. The change of scenery as regards earlier projects is thus evident; we are no longer reading a story organised according to the typically modern principle of a life which is focused, illuminated and becomes sedimentary but rather the complete opposite, now all that universe of values has been substituted by a number of parameters more in line with the late correction of that modern myth. The built area is now a space to be used in the most practical sense of the word, devoid of any pretentious ontological nature and, in its place, with an outline of a nature much more emphatically experimental. In light of this, it seems that we find ourselves with a project which has invented the optimum conditions to reinforce its objections to the modern account; but, in reality, the most interesting thing is that the ontologically weak character of the new post architecture is not used to facilitate opposition to Le Corbusier but to submit it to critical reading itself.

Having reached this point we should be rather careful about how we consider the question. We are not reducing the problem to a simple statement, according to which, the only difference between modern dreams and the contemporary horizon consists of the fact that the former aims to build a home and fails in the attempt, while nowadays, far from clearing up the procedure by which we could satisfactorily achieve the same dream, what we actually do is accept that condition of inclemency. All this actually floats around behind the whole series of Domènec’s projects which leads us to Ici même (dins de casa). In this, his latest project there persists an emphasis on the impossibility of establishing a living space in a complete sense; the idea of home – specified, as on other occasions, in the title itself – again showing its weakness when it becomes awkward shelter – a shed- which, on the other hand, could never fulfil the prospects of being a personal place, but rather, imposes its condition of being a place where strangers are doomed to meet each other. All this, shall we say, is indeed present in this project, but the most important thing, to say this in short, is that it appears to be based on a post space –not utopian any more but weak –which is also submitted to its own peculiar deconstruction and which, in this operation, instead of being celebrated as a space which is easy to handle and experimental, what is acknowledged is the ease in which the contemporary experience becomes perverted into an absolutely banal experience.

The mosaic of all the elements entering into this game is already laid down. The sequence we are attempting to organise would be like this: first it would be necessary to introduce a correction for formal ideals which guide and predetermine experience as, far from their pretensions, never managed to construct a space for happiness. This is what 24 hores de llum artificial (24 hours of artificial sun), Un lloc (A Place) or the photograph of the bus shelter in his latest work show. The second moment consists of adapting other models that are more inclined towards the unforeseeable value of the use of space and the construction of meaning based on real experience; Certain co-ordinates which do not allow a conventional home to be built either, but which at least respond to nature itself diffused of things. This is what drives the development of Ici même (dins de casa) based on a post construction, such as the pavilion represented by the bus shelter. The last episode begins when this kind of spatial alternative which hoards the value of the possibility of being used and of being a real experience, when being deconstructed, shows that, nowadays, the only real experience is that of absolute banality. In Ici même (dins de casa) this latter idea – that which is still not shown, banality- we think is expressed clearly in reducing the experience capable of containing the bus shelter into one possibility only: to be an experience of advertising and pause.

The shelter, given the fact of its typology and hypothetical function, is offered as a public space. In its condition of being a real space – a vulgar urban bus shelter – and being such a space for public use, is decorated likewise by a lighted box suitable for advertising. The image in question is one which makes the l’unité d’habitation appear as if it were a mysterious real estate promotional activity which, when read carefully, would invoke everything we have set out in the first part of this text; but beyond these tones which lie behind the image, it is obvious that only a religious obedience may be kept with this. It is such a technologically mediated image however it is considered, but its light and arrangement- an altar-, is the typical advertising image is absolutely aura-like before which we are urged to develop the real, the true, contemporary public activity: shopping. This is what is left of the world of experience.

From a viewpoint quite close to the one above, the only use that can be made of this area, apart from using it to become acquainted with advertising messages, is to use it in a totally negative way. It is no longer the aim of trying to substitute constructive activity so full of promise which praises modern morale due to a more occasional, ephemeral action, but with the value of liveliness and authenticity. In this shelter time is, put simply, inactivity; it is the pause of waiting for a bus that doesn’t exist, wasted time. The shelter is a low area, a low intensity space and not, as we may suppose from an easily post-modern rhetoric, a hot space due to its open availability. The atmosphere again becomes, as in other works, that of a pause; the same tempo of monotonous and absurd rhythm which hammers us, due to the praise of the everyday gesture, in the video With the cold inside home.

Less is more, the phrase made famous by Mies van der Rohe, has been repeated so many times out of context that it has ended up often serving not only to remind us of what is specifically modern in 20th century architecture and thus offering the theoretical key of minimal art, but even to grant aesthetic legitimacy to new forms of gastronomy offered by restaurants or to influential trends in fashion clothing, not to mention the deideologisation of certain political projects or of a weakening philosophical discourse. However, we have not been reminded, with the same insistence, of that other phrase with which Mies used, in perhaps a more incisive way, to consider his own architectural adventure: beinahe nichts [almost nothing]. This neglect towards selective quotes is not really innocuous: it reveals the conclusion that has usually been reached, concerning the modern movement in architecture, in terms that are rather esthetical, such as a determined formal purging of ornamentation and like a more or less geometrising abstraction of constructive materials: in summary, like an essentialist and emaciated decision sheltered by a certain artistic aestheticism. From Nietzsche’s criticism of aesthetic ideals, however, we know that any asceticism leads to turning the outward appearance into nothingness, turning it into a desert by deploying the inward appearance: that is probably why art is, as Nietzsche also thought, the most radical form of subversion of ascetic ideals or, formulated in a positive way, the way to recover the outward appearance.

And, in spite of this, with this essentialist and ascetic characterisation of the modern movement, perhaps the constitutively dangerous component of this contemporary Abgeschidenheit [detachment] has been thought little of: its approach towards those confines in which even the work could disappear, skirting silence and emptiness and getting closer to nothingness to the extent of becoming almost nothing. Without running this risk, this undressing runs the risk of becoming just another formal resort, a new way of ornamentation. Adorno warned us of this in a lucid way when he pointed out that radically modern pieces of art are those that come dangerously close to silence: namely, those that run the risk, in the process of applying the logic of decomposing, of getting close to the place in which the work itself runs the risk of failing to be such, namely the danger of not existing.

It is not irrelevant to begin with this deviation so as to pose some reflection upon the work by Domènec, marked from the start by a recurrence of themes based on dialogues with architecture from the modern movement (in particular with Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier) and by a close proximity of the dangerous limits of silence of which Adorno spoke. I am thinking, in particular, of two of these works by Domènec which, in a certain way, concentrate, in my opinion, a large part of his artistic concerns: 24 hores de llum artificial (24 hours of artificial light) and Ici même (dins de casa) (Right here (at home)), which are two projects that, on the other hand, include and carry on with, as if in a way of advancing and retrogressing, other works arising from the concern itself.

24 hores de llum artificial, as you know, recreates, on a real life scale, a room in a Paimio hospital by Alvar Aalto, reduced almost to a pure abstract structure, in an area which is illuminated constantly by a white light which configures a space with no shadows and no voices or noises: a clinical place in its purest state. It is true that this work is an architectural redefinition in an artistic key and, to a certain extent, also, sheltered by the strategy of quotes, a palimpsest: in this sense, he goes back to Aalto and, at the same time, he erases him. This paradox does not appear to me to be gratuitous: it is precisely the work by Aalto, seduced by the world of live nature like a metaphor of architecture, it is the area chosen by Domènec to set out a work in the nearest place to the idea of somebody’s ectopia, of one such, shall we say, Peter Eisenman. the clinical place in Paimio, a world within a world, a place within area, becomes, through Domènec’s radical intervention, a clinical intervention upon the clinic, a non existent place which is asserted precisely through the thing which it denies: we have, here, in an exemplary way, a very close impulse due to the implosion of contradictions, Hegel’s Aufhebung, even though, more than discussing dialectical excellence of the here and now in a higher synthesis of area and time, we should refer to it in terms of the deconstruction of here and now through the pure indication of a place with no area and beyond time. The difference is by no means banal: since Foucault’s time we have known that the appearance of the clinic leads to a subversion of the expression and the new creation of an area.

Nowadays we know that any work of art is also, in addition to many other things, a discourse on art: that all works are enigmatic scriptures (the code of which has been lost and the sense of which is based, above all, on this loss) and, at the same time, a reading, namely, a review, an interpretation. Domènec does not hide, but rather converts the reading into an explicit activity and, due to the distance used as regards what we are talking about, we could even call this, in actual fact, ironic. A type of irony like the one that beats in the silence used by Beckett, when words are quiet or when, precisely due to the fact that they are unspoken words, they speak more: like those silences that occupy, in his theatre works, more time –and more space –than the words actually spoken. On the other hand, there is, as in all reading, a vocation of commentary (reading is interpreting, legen is aus-legen), but which does not lead to a substantialist sacralisation of what is commented (the book, the work of art), but rather its erasing: in fact, all readings erase the book that has been read, like the room in 24 hores de llum artificial erases the rooms in Paimio. Each reading is inscribed in what has been read until it erases it. Maurice Blanchot knew this and Marc-Alain Ouaknin reminded us of this recently,: consubstantial Judaism in any act of reading. The first attitude before tradition is objection.

Foucault formulated this, also with precision, in actual fact in the prologue called The Birth of the Clinic. Archaeology of the Clinical Expression, a text which does not seem arbitrarily chosen to be remembered here: “In our times, [the chance of criticism and its need] are linked -and Nietzsche the philologist is a witness of this – to the fact that there is a language and that, in the innumerable words uttered by man –whether these are reasonable or irascible, demonstrative or poetical- a sense which befalls us has taken shape, which leads our blindness, but our conscience lurks in the darkness waiting to come into the light and start to speak. We are historically consecrated in history, to the patient construction of discourses on discourses, to the undertaking of listening to what has already been said. Is it so awful, for this very reason, that we do not know any other use of the word than that of commentary? The latter, in fact, questions the discourse on what is stated by this and what is meant by this, it attempts to bring out this double meaning of the words, in which this finds itself in an identity with itself, which it is supposed is closer to its truth; it thus involves declaring what has been said, repeating what has never been uttered”. Therefore, commenting, exercising this form of criticism that is every type of reading as a rereading, it is to admit a residue, necessarily a non formulated one, of the thought that language (also the language of the work) has left in the shade; and, therefore, commenting means that the things that are left unspoken slumber in the word of the work and that, by questioning it, we can make it speak although this is not specifically meant.

In this sense, eliminating the shadows is, in 24 hores de llum artificial, an artistic strategy to force what has already been said (by Aalto, by the modern movement, by the clinical architecture of the century) so that it states what is not uttered. In this sense, also, there lies in the recurrence which leads Domènec to turn and return, over and over and again, to the areas in Paimio, to the conscience of an unexpressed individual that does not allow itself to be revealed once and for all, but rather a background or residue which, only in the interminable rereading, may be explored in its enigma. Domènec’s work is, therefore, a lucid exercise of criticism and, therefore, of artistic writing of a sense that only allows itself to be travelled over in its deployment as a work. If the appearance of the clinic means subverting the expression it is because it goes beyond the limit between what is visible and what is invisible (up to that time): when Domènec goes back to the Paimio sanatorium –and he does so as if he were intervening clinically in the clinic – he subverts, once more, that distinction, redisplacing it towards other places and making other areas emerge there. The area given to 24 hores de llum artificial. If with the appearance of the clinic, evil, the anti natural and death come into the light, they are brought to light in a new area which allows a new expression to be born (“that which was fundamentally invisible is offered suddenly to the brightness of the expression” -writes Foucault), Domènec, with his intervention, which is a rereading that erases the text and the work in which his work, as a text, is inscribed, knocks off balance, that background on which the clinic itself again,–as a metaphor of the modern expression – is based. With this, due to the area’s idleness and the confrontation with silence, he provides a view of what is not seen, he provides a reading of what is unwritten. From here, perhaps, from this displacement of the limits, emerges a new, certainly disturbing, area and a new expression. The clinic within the clinic, the area within the area, the light within the light: the expression within the expression. Rewriting which is erasing.

* * * * *

In Contre Sainte-Beuve Proust wrote that the writer invents a new language within his own language, a language which is foreign, since it leads his language to the extreme in which the language becomes delirious, making one see through it, something which had never been seen before, even though man had never stopped looking at it. Therefore, the writing of delirium is a writing of vision, in the same way that the vision of delirium, which carries the images (already seen) to the extreme that they also become foreign images, is a vision of the writing. From this, therefore in Critical and Clinical, Deleuze was able to take a lesson: when language carves a foreign language in its interior, it produces an explosion within the confines of language. Thus, “when delirium become a clinical condition, words no longer lead to nothing, one no longer listens to nothing nor sees nothing through it, except for a night which has lost its history, its colours and its songs”. The white night in 24 hores de llum artificial, devoid of history because it has been erased, devoid of colours and sounds: like the writing in artificial light by Derrida, the only way to reach the outside is through withdrawing into the writing of the text, the image. Pure emergence from the outward appearance in the inward appearance of the work (the writing). Paimio was brought to its own outward appearance by a withdrawal into the inside of artificial light, it appraises it from within. Even Deleuze: “Any work is a journey, a trip, but one which only travels such and such an outer way by virtue of the inner roads and ways which make up this trip, which constitute its landscape or its harmony”. Domènec: writing on writing, images on images: movement.

* * * * *

Reflection on architecture, that of Domènec’s, which is also an approach towards the silence of area: where area is turned into an invocation of shapes and other areas, a utopian breath, also, having become, through the passage of time, pure undressed political structure. The policy –that in the sanatoriums, that concerning the discourse on health – on the areas which substitute the politics of areas: areas built to be lived in and which end up being areas of confinement. Areas of confinement full of an annoying noise of eccentricity: from here, the recovery, by Domènec, of the silence of certain areas that time has turned into mutes. From here, the artificial light to write (Derrida) and to convert the text and work into a deconstructed area: the only chance to inhabit, during the waiting, areas which demand to be reread.

Displacement towards the inside of areas of modern architecture to open other areas: the chance of an image which is born out of the displacement and which inaugurates a new temporality for these areas. Temporality launched forward by a return to the past, as if it were a rewriting and erasing of the past. The outward appearance is already present in 24 hores de llum artificial, pure deconstructed inward appearance, pure displacement. Un lloc (A Place) and Ici même (dins de la casa), on the other hand, provoke the explosion of the inward appearance in the outward appearance which they inhabit, opening up a static area, paradoxically, in the circuit of displacement. Domènec’s paradoxes: cartography of certain works which overturn the real cartography of areas and times in the works.

* * * * *

Domènec’s dialogue with Le Corbusier and his unité d’habitation is the core of the works that surround Un lloc and, in particular, Ici même (dins de casa). In the intervention of the bus shelter in a waiting area, Domènec has brought to the outside the reflection concerning the inner area, the clinic, in artificial light, which he has unveiled in 24 hores de llum artificial. With this he has returned to the Lebenswelt [the world of life] his deconstruction of space based on modern categories. And he has done so, also here, and perhaps even in a more emphatic way, with a certain ironical distancing: having turned it at the same time into an advertising panel and a waiting place. Again, the space of silence, here amid the urban noise, like a space within a space which inaugurates a time within time: the waiting time through the construction designed for living in.

Heidegger wrote, in a basic text called Construct, inhabit, think, that space is not an absolute and neutral constant in which things are contained, but rather the things that open it up. Works that are constructions do not take up space, but rather open it up: they make it and they unfold it from that artistic strategy which is purely spatial. The work sets in place an opening of the space from the work, because space is only visible and, as such, comprehensible, in all its difficulty, as one thing (here the work) shows it, making it emerge from its non existence and from its invisibility. Ici même (dins de casa) shows urban space confronted with its own paradoxes: space to live in which is a pure junction without any inhabitants, a place that leads to nowhere, utopia as a type of propaganda, an outside that is an inside, within which hiding can only be shown on the outside. Constructing to wait, which is a way of living, and to think, which is also a way of waiting.

A bus shelter for waiting in the place that makes waiting impossible: to live there where thinking is harder. And arriving, from the ontological viewpoint of the work, at an almost nothingness: there where the work aims to be inconspicuous as a work, there where the glance is calling out to be taken, also he is, as far as its deconstruction.

And, in the last instance, with a precise and metronomic recurrence, just one sound, also an almost nothing which ends up being a sound of absence, the sound of a scheme. The absence of bodies in 24 hores de llum artificial, the absence of people waiting in Un lloc and in Ici même (dins de casa). Absence and pure scheme of nothingness which just cannot make its presence but which, in spite of this, is quite visible. Just a sound: the liquid (milk) poured into a glass, the swallowing, the gulping, pouring, swallowing, gulping, pouring, swallowing, gulping, pouring, swallowing, gulping, ….

Xavier Antich
(Domènec. Domestic, 2001)

Text for the publication Domènec. Domestic. (Lleida City Council, Mataró Cultural Board and ACM, 2001)

Living among ruins. Living among objects, in one’s own and others’ spaces. Building upon the ruins of history. Abolishing the error and the horror? Building upon the projects of modernity? Beginning over and over again. Building upon poverty , upon silence and emptiness? No aesthetics without ethics. From the city’s desert following the battle, Berlin levelled by the bombs, expertly set by Roberto Rosselini in Germania, anno zero (1947), to the contemporary city’s opulence based on everyday speculation, for instance, the Barcelona in the devastation of one’s memory, reliably documented by José Luis Guerin in En construcción (2001). The transformations of urban space, changes in the ways of everyday life erase the moral memory of collective history, but also one’s own experiences, the mute presence of everyday objects, the invisible trace of public and private habits. In the devastated landscape of our individual and collective memory, the presence of architecture and everyday objects, the inner space, domestic space occupies a supreme territory in building our personal imagination, in building our shared life. “Architecture is the genuine battle ground of our spirit”, wrote Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in 1950.

In a scene from Ordet (The Word) (1955), the great poem set into a film by Dreyer, Johannes, the fool, the mystic ¾who, through his faith will make the miracle of life come true¾, in a conversation with the pastor, who feels perplexed, who enters Borgen’s house and states: “I’m a builder… I build houses, but man doesn’t want to live in them… They want to build them themselves… But they can’t no matter how hard they try. And therefore some live in half-finished huts… others in ruins… but most wander about without a house or a home.”

Around the time when Dreyer was filming Ordet, in August 1954, Heidegger, who had never uttered a word of criticism about the nazi barbarity, was completing a volume called, Conferences and Articles (Vorträge und Aufsätze), in which, among other papers, he mentioned his famous text “Build, inhabit, think” (Bauen Wohnen Denken), from a conference he presented in 1951. The philosopher stated: “The genuine penury of residing lies in the fact that we mortals must first seek to discover once again the art of residing, we have to learn first how to reside.” Because “only if we are capable of residing may we build.”

Around the same time, Maurice Blanchot, in L’espace littéraire (Literary Space) (1955), wrote that, in literary work, in the work of art, uncovering the truth will not lead us to see the light, unlike what Heideggaer stated, but rather will lead us into darkness, to the nomad’s desert, endless wandering, the anonymity of nowhere. Huts in the desert.

It may be cinema that is the art through which the difficulty of modern man to inhabit the world has been shown, in a more direct and diverse way, in a sustainable way, in balance with nature, and holding a conversation with the other, following the contemporary ways of life governed by speed, violence, usury, consumerism and the loss of individual and collective identities. The need of a house, one’s own home, a domestic space where it is possible to find privacy, even if this is set in a nomadic way of life, which beside spaces that are really public, allow a free, sovereign and supportive subject to become, in our society which is far too obsessed with show business, one of the primary needs of the contemporary individual.

One of the most moving scenes in the world of cinema at the end of the 20th century is the one shown in Offret (Sacrifice) (1986), Andrei Tarkovski’s cinematography testament. It concerns a six-minute sequence which shows how Alexander, the film’s main character sets light to and watches, silently, while his wooden house burns, situated beside the sea, on an island. This is no gratuitous or nihilistic feat, but rather a real sacrifice. It is a radical and solitary gesture, Alexander decides to get rid of everything, even his own home and his beloved son, so as to save humanity, his family, from a possible world catastrophe. Alexander’s house, the Offret house, makes up the symbolic centre of the extraordinary parable by Tarkovski which decries the materialism and nihilism of the western world and calls for a spiritual or religious experience, the individual’s responsibility, as the only ways for us to escape from destruction. The initial image and the end of Offret which are shown by Alexander’s son watering a wilted dry tree — symbol of faith, according to Tarkovski — symbolise hope in the future which the author of Andrei Rublev or Stalker wishes to convey.

Beside these messianic examples, the utopian dream of a modern project is built dealing with rational architecture which has also been inherited from the art and thought of the 20th century, which has struggled to project, with some obvious success and failure, a new way of life, a new way of residing, with the will, even, of succeeding in changing society. It is the tradition of the illustration project, of architectural modernity, majestically represented by Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe or Alvar Aalto, whom Domènec has reclaimed and revised in a number of the most outstanding works in recent years.

Domènec (Mataró, 1962), with admirable coherence and honesty, has focused his artistic work on critical and lyrical thought concerning the paradoxes and mysteries of modern life, concerning our way of residing, based on our relationship with space and objects. Based on conceptual processes of thought, Domènec has gradually created a pictorial, sculptural, object-oriented, photographic and video-graphic work which takes the project of object-oriented and architectural design as if they were one of the most productive and complex imaginary constructions of modern tradition. Domènec extracts ambiguous objects, disturbing facilities and perplexing visions from the contradictory results and the multiple fissures of the project of architectural, artistic and philosophical modernity, all of which raises the question concerning failures in political, social and esthetical utopias while addressing the spiritual misery and the existential absurdity of our everyday lives, our domestic lives. The cultural and social alienation of the individual as one of the clearest consequences of modern capitalism in the Western world becomes one of the most recurring ideas in the work of Domènec.

In an intuitive and gradual way, and thanks to the possibilities gained through recognition of his work, Domènec has gradually widened the scope of his artistic exploration, ranging from the creation of small-sized paintings and sculptures to the building of areas where one may walk through or even works of large scale facilities.

During the nineties, Domènec concentrated on the world of sculpture, always from a highly original practice, mainly working on series of exhibits with small dimensions which have gradually grown. Characterised by their sensuality of touch as well as being formal, the sculptures from the Freeze series (1994-1996), made in wood and nails, surprise one due to their capacity of creating fascination while at the same time, rejection or, even, disgust. As the fetishes of African cultures, the sculptures in the Freeze series do not leave us unmoved. These works, whose abstract organic shapes come from the subconscious or remind us of animal shapes or everyday objects, such as larvae or cushions, constitute single colour sculptures, an off white, covered, in some cases with nails or thorns, such as cacti, sea urchins or hedgehogs.

The works in the Freeze series provoke, voluntarily, distance, coldness. They are ambiguous sculptures, between the everyday object and fetish, which, because of their crafted finish and their organic shapes, become distanced equally from the pieces of a minimalist type and those of a conceptual origin. These characteristics are highlighted even more in the series titled Híbrids (1996-1998), sculptures also made of wood, hand turned on a lathe, equally monochrome, in white, in which the possible functional or aesthetic features of the object are mixed. Hybrids, mysterious enigmatic objects, which begin by showing holes, or opening up their inner sides until they form inhabitable spaces. Pieces which evoke the idea of a nest, the idea of a cave, the idea of the mother’s womb. The lack of communication, isolation, which the works from the Freeze series seemed to transmit, begins to become clear in the pieces from the Híbrids series, which appear to long to open themselves up to space and to hold a plausible dialogue with the other.

El rostre aliè (Someone else’s face) is the title of two different pieces which, in my opinion, highlight certain milestones in the evolution of Domènec’s work. As a result of a joint workshop held with the Portuguese artist Cabrita Reis, held in Montesquiu, in 1994, Domènec created an ephemeral installation titled El rostre aliè. This concerned a rectangular wooden structure placed outdoors, exposed to the wind and rain, hollow, and painted white, where the only thing highlighted was the appearance of a mantelpiece, also painted in white, which bore no object or thing. Like an empty secular temple, like an anti-monument, El rostre aliè (1994) was the first sculptural piece with an architectural structure created by Domènec. The opening to a dialogue, before someone else’s face, however, does not appear to be the functional aim of this construction at all, which fails to turn into a confessional or an area for transcendental meditation either. With the same title of El rostre aliè, in 1997, Domènec created a sculpture which had the shape of a mask but devoid of the openings for the eyes or mouth and which was meant to be placed on a wall, thus the likely wearer of the mask ¾as the creator himself has shown in a series of photographs¾ has to be placed facing the wall. It is the impossible task of striking up a dialogue, the impossible task of the glance, the rejection of the other. But, also, the need for otherness. Je est un autre, wrote Rimbaud. Our face is someone else’s face, the other myself. The dialogue, as Freud has shown us, begins in oneself. Without the inner opening, without the opening up to the other, dialogue cannot begin. It is based on this need for a dialogue, of this need for opening up, that the area opens up, where architecture appears like a place, a living space, a place where one can exchange things and a place for communication, or for a lack of communication, providing isolation or silence.

In an excerpt from the outstanding text titled “Ablèpsia, l’artista cec” (Ablepsia, the Blind Artist), dating back to 1997, Domènec reflects on a photographed portrait of Buster Keaton, who appears sitting with both his hands open covering his eyes. It is a still from the movie titled Film (1964), the only incursion into the movie world by Samuel Beckett. As if he were referring to El rostre aliè (1994 and 1997), Domènec wrote: “The difficulty of understanding what we see, the impossibility of the look. The artist is like a blind man within a totally white cold storage room, overtaken by a feverish dizziness, whom in an effort of dubious usefulness attempts to make art become a skin which wraps the chaos, the materialisation of a large hole. Petit vide grande lumière cube tout blancheur faces sans trace aucun souvenir [Samuel Beckett, Sans]. The white blindness, a nowhere place.”

The series of photographs titled Blanc com la llet (White as Milk) (1998) is the witness of the appearance of a number of fragile and delicate organic shapes, parallel to the latest works from the Híbrids series. This deals with enlargements of photographs of small ephemeral models, made in white plasticine and later destroyed. These are totally ambiguous from which may be compared to body organs or precarious living spaces, clay huts, the dens of several different animals. We may also evoke the irregular shapes of a cave. The danger and the strangeness of these mysterious and particular areas, elemental and simple living spaces, express a nomadic existence, exposed to the elements, reduced to the minimum expression. In Höhlenausgänge (Departures from the Cave) (1989) — as Franz Josef Wetz remarked in his study concerning the German philosopher —, Hans Blumenberg features man as a visible being who escapes from reality by sheltering in the invisibility of the cave. The visibility of the cave obliges man to become aware of his nakedness and his defenselessness. “There is only one way out of the cave — states Blumenberg —, the one that is in ourselves.”

In the midst of a culture obsessed by show business, by audiovisual simulations of the virtual image, opening oneself up to a new critical look, building up once again from poverty, from the realities which we experience. A new primitivism, a new humanism, which places man above technique. If the experience of progress has led us to war and destruction, experience and poverty bring us back to everyday life, back to the pleasure of a simple and free life. This is what Walter Benjamin experienced in Ibiza, and where he set his article in 1933 titled “Erfahnung und arumt” “Experience and poverty”, some years before his tragic death in Portbou, in 1940, as recalled by Vicente Valero in his biographical essay Experience and Poverty. Walter Benjamin in Ibiza, 1932-1933 (2001). “A poverty which leads us to start all over again, to think all over again from scratch, to get by with very little, to build with almost nothing, without turning one’s head either left or right. Among the great creators, there have always been impeccable spirits who began from scratch,” says Benjamin in his article “Experience and Poverty”, in which he mentioned, for instance, the works by Paul Klee or Adolf Loos.

It is the tradition of modernity, of the avant-garde, always beginning again, which sought other ways, in the return to our origins, to primitivism, to the essential things, the freeing of the academia, the freeing of an accumulation of history, of being free from the dependence of technique. And if, from among the constraints and weaknesses of minimal art and conceptual art, arte povera was to arise, at the same time as the excesses of the most frivolous post modern art, there has emerged a more critical post modern art, and more politically compromised, which has taken up again and reordered ideas, attitudes and proposals of conceptual art, minimal art, of arte povera. Domènec places himself, with his unusual work, within this critical post modern art which, by critically going over the tradition of modernity, does not renounce, here and now, hic et nunc, the fact of building a livable area, both individual and collective, from the most extreme poverty and lucidity.

In the last years of the nineties, Domènec began to work on projects which are based on precise architectural references. The installation titled 24 hores de llum artificial (24 Hours of Artificial Light) (1998-1999) recreates on full scale a room in the tuberculosis hospital in Paimio (1929-1933) made by Alvar Aalto —considered as a model due to its open relationship with natural elements—, which becomes a large wooden model on a full scale, devoid of windows, where the beds and the hospital equipment become monochrome sculptures which have nothing to do with their original function, useless objects, lit up excessively by the blinding light of neon lights which dazzle the view of the visitor. The project by Aalto concerning Paimio, in the recreation by Domènec, no longer exists, it has been deleted, neutralised, annihilated. The place in Paimio has become a nowhere. Heterotopia has become displacement. Domènec brings us face to face with the transformation of a utopian space of a modern project in a displaced space, devoid of personality, lifeless. Domènec’s negative critical reinterpretation is no criticism aimed at Aalto, but rather, it is obvious, a criticism of the evolution of our society which has blinded, annulled, impaired modern architectural projects. As if Domènec has reinterpreted Aalto based on Beckett. As Martí Peran mentioned in his article “24 hores de llum artificial. After Alvar Aalto” (1998): “the installation, in spite of Aalto’s accurate shadow, could easily be the room where Malone lay in death’s agony”. Have we really ended up living in a universal cloned clinic?

Un lloc (A Place) (2000) and Ici même (dins de casa) [Ici même (At Home)] (2000) share the presence of a model, and the photograph of this model in the woods, in one of Le Corbusier’s most renowned works: la Unité d’habitation in Marseille (1947-1952). The emblematic building of living quarters designed by Le Corbusier in Marseille which studies the creation of a rigorously new way of residence and of constituting veritable communities, converted into a furniture-model (it could also be a mini-bar) made in wood, painted white, becomes the fetiche, the curio, the absent centre of a single room in the installation of Un lloc (A Place). Beside the model of the Unité d’habitation, a bed, a chair and a bookshelf make up the austere and monochrome furniture reduced to the minimum expression. The contrast between the presence of the furniture piece-model and the absence of dialogue with the other inexpressive elements in the room, considers inverting one’s own place, from the private place, into the no-place of the impersonal space of contemporaneity.

What does the simplifying and trivialising model of Le Corbusier’s building stand for in the installation titled Un lloc? It is true that —as was explained by Stanislaus von Moos in his biography on Le Corbusier— the Swiss architect sets out formally from the idea of a case of bottles. The separate houses are placed in the reinforced concrete structure like bottles in a case. But Domènec is not so interested in the wealth and formal and structural complexity of the work as in the paradigmatic character of the building when considering a utopian housing project of, as an emblem of modernity as well as an aesthetic, political and social project.

In the work titled Ici même (dins de casa) (2000) the photograph of the model of the Unité d’habitation has become a simple iconoclastic advertising slogan placed in an area reserved for publicity inside a shelter built for a bus stop. Domènec has even edited the image of the model of Le Corbusier’s building in a serigraph, photographed in a forest, to make it into a simulation of a commercial which had been placed in different places for urban exhibits designed in Mataró and Banyoles. The recreation of the emblem of modernity has become a make, a logotype, a simple advertising slogan devoid of all real aim save one’s own critical referentiality which is proposed by Domènec’s project. Like a post modern ruin, like a boat adrift, the image of modernity offered to us by Domènec is frankly pessimistic, between the pure propaganda and the theme park the remains of the wreckage of modernity arise. Faced with banality and simulation, just an archaeology of knowledge, a profound and critical look, can bring us back, even though it is with sincere scepticism, the spirit of utopia.

 As a precedent of the work and urban involvement Ici même (dins de casa), Domènec, in the framework of the project of an exhibition called Segona estació (Second Station) in Benifallet, built the installation titled Ici même (1999). The same prototype of a bus shelter he designed for Ici même (dins de casa), made of wood, painted white, with a long bench to sit upon and a roof to protect the user from the elements, was placed in the middle of the countryside, in a place where no means of transport existed. The difference is that the bright space reserved for advertisements is empty, it only projects white light on the visitor to the exhibition. Ici même, here and now, hic et nunc. Domènec created a place, an area where time stood still, a new area for relationships, for exchanges, for dialogues, for conversation, for thought, which, above all because of its brightness, has been used at night in several public festivals, as a number of photographs and videos prove. This public place, which has also become a no-place, a place in white, hollow, devoid of all type of added symbols or images, an available place, a free place.

The video titled Amb el fred dins de casa (With the Cold within the House) (2001), he shows us how a common glass cup is filled with milk and how a hand takes the cup and straight away swigs the liquid down. This is a type of endless video, recorded with just one fixed camera, with a complete technical austerity. The raised volume of this daily occurrence and the infinite repetition of this anonymous gesture of filling and drinking the milk offer us an ambivalent and ambiguous reading. On the one hand, it makes us think of the need to value more deeply our usual actions, our everyday gestures; on the other hand, it brings us face to face with the repetition and the banality of our lives. As the shocking memory of a glass of milk gulped down every morning, the recollection and the presence of the apparently simplest and most insignificant actions also form part of our deep experience which make up our present and our future.

Like silent witnesses of a unique and enigmatic existence, the works by Domènec appear to us like anthropological objects, like anthropological places or like anthropological thoughts concerning the present from the field of art. The inside and the outside, the house and the street, before the workshop, the gallery or the museum, become the places where works of art are shown. Like the uninhabited area which was created by the burnt down house of Offret (Sacrifice), the film by Tarkovski, Domènec considers the work of art as a continuous new beginning from white, from emptiness, from nothingness. “In the true reality of our world today, the places and the areas, the places and the nowheres become intertwined, become penetrated among themselves”, states Marc Augé in Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (1992). Building the place for art is opening the area of thought; going deeper into the complexity of our existence; opening up our freedom, both individual and collective; preserving areas of privacy, the most particular things belonging to areas and cultures; while, at the same time, freeing the areas, the places and the nowheres, from political, economic, social and cultural borders which are limited by the physical and mental maps of our world.

Manuel Guerrero

Hace ya tiempo que estamos un tanto desengañados. Desengañados de nuestro mundo, conscientes que no nos queda lugar para las utopías. En fin, llevamos algún tiempo habitando el fracaso de la modernidad. Y sin embargo esta condición que afecta tan de lleno al arte, si bien ha calado en el discurso, no lo ha hecho tanto en la actitud del artista. Me refiero a la imposibilidad de seguir pensando en la radicalidad, y en la necesidad de encontrar soluciones que no se conformen con la mediocridad cotidiana o la mezquindad de mi yo y mis circunstancias. Domènec es un artista que no piensa en los extremos sino en los cruces de esos extremos; que no ofrece una obra basada en la seducción (atrapando al vuelo los discursos a la moda) sino que en su pensamiento artístico por esquivo y complejo podríamos hablar de una mecánica seductora. Y una vez más, que nadie se equivoque, que parta de la complejidad no significa que sea difícil, sino que su obra puede resultar todo lo contrario. A fin y al cabo, su propuesta principal en esta exposición es muy sencilla: la reproducción de una habitación del hospital antituberculosis de Alvar Aalto en Paimio (Finlandia).

Aunque no se trata exactamente de la reproducción de la habitación diseñada por Aalto. Más bien es la reproducción de la habitación “ideal” de Aalto. En palabras del arquitecto: “una habitación con gran cantidad de luz, con equilibrio de sus características acústicas y con un uso del color que garantice un ambiente general tranquilo”. Aalto pensaba en una arquitectura que desarrollase el funcionalismo hacia una dimensión humana, casi íntima. Sin embargo, cuando Domènec convierte su habitación en un verdadero lugar ocupado por la luz multiplicada por fluorescentes (“24 horas de luz artificial” es el título de la exposición), totalmente blanco, con todos los objetos hechos en superficies suaves de madera y una fina capa de yeso, sin esquinas; no estamos muy seguros de encontrarnos en “casa”. Catherine Millet en una conferencia comentaba que no creía que el fin de la modernidad coincidiese con su fracaso, sino tal vez con su éxito, cumplimiento decía ella. En la medida en la que el arte había ocupado la ciudad en espacios públicos e inimaginados hasta la fecha y en la medida que la imagen que los artistas modernos habían creado ocupa nuestras vidas en la televisión, las tiendas, el diseño etc. Su conclusión venía a ser que vivíamos en el paraíso prometido por los artistas modernos, y sin embargo si echamos una ojeada a nuestro alrededor nos damos cuenta de que tal paraíso se parece demasiado al infierno. La habitación de Domènec, la habitación de Aalto, tampoco es demasiado cómoda.

El trabajo de Domènec plantea una incomodidad física: esa habitación, el colmo de la medida humana, es casi cruel en su calidez, en la luz sofocante que oculta los contornos. Y plantea una incomodidad intelectual porque ya no trabaja en los extremos, no busca un contra-argumento frente a la modernidad, no quiere subvertirla, no desvela sus errores, sino que la subraya, la sigue al pie de la letra y entonces muestra que no funciona. ¡Qué no funciona!, ¿qué es lo que no funciona? No será que la habitación de Aalto en Paimio es una excusa, un punto de partida y no el núcleo de la reflexión. Y si ni tan sólo se trata de reflexión sino de la presentación directa de un conflicto irresoluble con los objetos, con nuestros objetos, con nuestras casas y vidas. Porque los objetos, habitaciones y casas de Domènec funcionan perfectamente en cuanto tales. Nos atraen y nos rechazan, hechos de madera y yeso son cálidos y fríos al tiempo. Naturales y artificiales delatan nuestra incapacidad para sostenerlos, en un paraíso que se parece demasiado al infierno. Frente a esa habitación tan segura de si misma que nos expulsa, Domènec tan sólo presenta un díptico fotográfico: “Blanco como la leche”. Un agujero, una caverna, una mísera casa hecha en plastelina, que se desmorona, que es precaria. Entre contradicciones la obra de Domènec está hecha de objetos híbridos.

Esta idea, esta palabra, “híbrido”, es central en el trabajo de Domènec. Cuando al principio escribía que su pensamiento artístico se sitúa en un cruce de extremos, en realidad me refería a una condición híbrida. Pero no es que esa palabra sea imprescindible para explicar la obra (que a diferentes niveles se explica por si sola) sino que muestra una adecuación extraña de encontrar entre el aspecto puramente formal de la obra, su recepción y sus argumentos conceptuales. Al final no nos importa si vivimos el fin de la modernidad o no, sino que entre el desengaño y la mediocridad encontramos retratadas nuestras limitaciones en objetos híbridos hechos de un pensamiento híbrido. Y lo más importante es el control que sobre ello tiene Domènec al medir con precisión lo expuesto en la sala de la calle Mocada, solamente dos obras.

David G. Torres
Barcelona, diciembre 1998
www.davidgtorres.net