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To represent a country free of conflicts.
To construct official scenes of popular culture.
Folkloric elements that refer to an ancestral past or to modernity.
In some attributes, ideologies collide.
The Poble Espanyol is a sum of architectural recreations that reorders the Spanish imaginary and links it to folklore and ancient customs. As part of the same International Exhibition of 1929, and only a few meters below, Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion becomes, in this case, a renewed expression of the culture of work and of the project of modernity. Both are areas that stage ideologies apparently opposed, but that, at the end, require of each other. How, if not through contrast, can we perceive the new from the old?
Oriol Vilanova juxtaposes the Poble Espanyol with the Mies van der Rohe’s Pavilion as if we were talking of stage designs. He pokes around in search of potential lines of continuity, and forces interruptions into the values they represent. The ellipsis he draws brings both places into a paradoxical situation: the pavilion, with its 1986 reconstruction, stops being modern to become a notorious example of a culture imbued in historicist simulacra. The Poble Expanyol, meanwhile, becomes an inevitable post-modern referent, and an instigator of that same Mies van der Rohe’s recreation. What type of archaeology do we apply to the copy?
Oriol Vilanova (Manresa, 1980) lives and works in Brussels. Recent exhibitions: MACBA, Barcelona; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida; Elisa Platteau, Brussels; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Capella Sant Roc, Valls; Parra & Romero, Madrid; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona; MUSAC, León; among others. He is represented by Parra & Romero.
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.