To rename the squares.
To move monuments.
To turn people who do not practise sport into Olympic champions.
History changes when institutions allow it.
The appearance of objects from the past in the public space is subject to bureaucracy.
Commemorative processes are traversed by an inescapable tension. On the one hand, the use of the word “commemoration” reminds us of the attitude we have toward all that is established as important and solemn. On the other, “commemoration” is also the action of remembering together, in community, “com-memorate”. The first meaning shows a hierarchical function of memory that tends toward institutionalization. The second, on the contrary, refers to the horizontality on which collective memory circulates while connected to the heterogeneous nature of the social. To commemorate becomes, therefore, a controversial action, the space where the drive to control memorial narratives and the drive to persistently seek its dissemination across social differences are negotiated.
Double authorization arises from the intersection of two stories. One makes reference to the moves and copies made to a monument dedicated to Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia; the other makes reference to changing the name of a square at Mont-roig del Camp from Generalísimo Franco to Joan Miró. Monuments and squares, most probably, are the two ways that western culture has set aside, par excellence, for commemorative display. In this case, however, Lola Lasurt explores them from the perspective of their unpredictability, focusing on the moment of transit. Thus, we are allowed to perceive how, from the intersection between the impulse to officially sanction memories and the impulse of emergent memories, can surge unexpected commemorative constructions, as well as, debates spurred by their aesthetics, political and social implications
Lola Lasurt (Barcelona, 1983) lives and works between Ghent, Belgium, and Barcelona. Recent exhibitions: Learn and Teach, Greatmore Art Studios (South Africa); Los Inmutables, DAFO (Lleida); Amnesies, Espai2 (Terrassa); El Gegant Menhir, L’Aparador at the Museum Joan Abelló (Mollet del Vallès); La Gran Aventura (Can Felipa Arts Visuals (Barcelona); Selected at the International Painting Prize of the Fundació Guasch Coranty, Tecla Sala (L’Hospitalet); among others. Recent grants: Exchange Scholarship Hangar/Greatmore Art Studios, South Africa; CoNCA grants for production and research in the fields of art and thought; among others. She is currently a resident artist at HISK, Ghent, and is a member of the Leland Palmer collective.
Preventive Archeology: The projects that Oriol Vilanova, Lúa Coderch, Lola Lasurt, Antonio Gagliano and LaFundició will show at the Arqueologia preventiva program, propose a series of displacements on the superficial layer of memory. More than exploring the past, they conduct a tracking of the forms under which, at present, history is presented, narrated and shared in the public realm; a mapping of the legacies that we have inherited and that engage our relationship with times past; and paths to a number of places from which to question our collective memory.