In reality, these ideas could be reduced to a single idea-vector that would consist of decentralizing and dislocating the spaces, discourses, and roles established in the field of art, with the aim of – as far as possible – instituting more horizontal and fair processes and relationships between the various agents involved in the production of meaning, within and through said field.
One of the fundamental operations of the project was to move these processes of knowledge construction and relationship outside the space of the Fundació Joan Miró, and place them in a new space, within a specific geographical, social and cultural context1 such as the Bellvitge neighborhood.
This choice was not random: since February of that year, LaFundició had a small premises at number 11 Carrer Prat in this neighborhood of L’Hospitalet. There, we had begun to try to open spaces and times in which diverse individuals and groups could find in culture a sphere of dialogue and negotiation (not without conflict). Likewise, we had been plotting potentially lasting collaboration networks.
From September 2013 to September 2014, this space was doubled as Espai 14-15 of the Fundació Miró, a space that could be considered, in turn, as a double of Espai 13 itself. And we say a double because Espai 14-15 did not pretend to be a copy or an extension in Bellvitge of the institutional space of the Fundació Joan Miró. Otherwise, we intended to place the different actors involved in the cycle Preventive Archeology, in a network of relationships different from the usual one in the artistic institution. We are not referring only to the artists who participated in the cycle –Oriol Vilanova, Lúa Coderch, Lola Lasurt and Antonio Gagliano– and its curator, Oriol Fontdevila, but also to the works themselves and their creation processes, the staff of the Fundació Joan Miró and that amorphous and too abstract entity that are its audiences.
In this sense, Espai 14-15 did not want to have a program of activities, but rather a series of moments in which work processes already active in the territory were made visible and related to the programming of Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró.
Nor was it a question of producing a local reading of the contents of the cycle or, worse still, of offering a reading adapted to the social and cultural context of Bellvitge. In a very different way, our intention was to test new agencies in order to generate hybrid —monstrous— ways of doing and knowing that would make it easier for each of those involved (among whom we counted ourselves) to rethink their position in the cultural field and the range of possibilities that said position implies.
The exhibition cycle Preventive Archeology was presented as a series of tours of some ways of doing associated with the writing of history (understanding ‘writing’ in a broad sense) and what we could call ‘production of memory’ (and also to the production of its reverse: oblivion).
Each of the artists who participated took as a pre-text some of these ways of doing or some of the devices that operate in these ways of doing; the resulting works gave rise to thinking about the regimes of truth that they institute.
We understand that our role was not to add a new ‘layer of meaning’ or a critical reading to the work of the artists; otherwise, we understood that it could be to provide a series of times and spaces that facilitate collective processes of meaning production. We also understand that, with the aim of dehierarchizing knowledge, these processes should not focus on the work and discourse of the artists and the curator of the cycle, but should relate these to existing social and cultural processes that also have to do with the historiographic production and collective memory. Processes that were already taking place autonomously, in a social and cultural context different from that of the Fundació Miró, such as the Bellvitge neighborhood. Processes in which LaFundició, as ‘inhabitants’ of that territory, were already involved from the beginning —and continue to be involved long after Preventive Archeology ended—.
We understand that putting the agents, the work, the knowledge and the discourses coming from the field of contemporary art in relation with those present in the context of Bellvitge, involves creating ‘contact zones’2; that is, times and spaces in which to collectively address the points in common and the controversies that may exist between both spheres. We were not trying, therefore, with Espai 14-15, to create a neutral dialogical space
We can say that memory is built (and destroyed) continuously: in a casual conversation on the street, in the media, when reading a textbook, when taking a photo, when erecting or demolishing a monument… countless acts with very different scales that produce memory and oblivion. In Bellvitge, many of these acts were then related to the commemoration in 2015 of the 50th anniversary of the construction of the neighborhood, and the commemoration in 2014 of the 300th anniversary of the siege of Barcelona.
The respective commemorations of these two apparently disparate events shared, in reality, very similar ways of doing. The facts are the facts and that is unquestionable, they tell us —some historians, among other people—; however, what is questionable is the way in which the facts are ordered, categorized and related, as well as the context in which the stories are placed and the order of the discourse in which they are inserted. And Preventive Archeology and Espai 14-15 were a bit about that.
1 Obviously, Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró is also located in a specific geographical, social and cultural context, however this is something that artistic institutions try to avoid by presenting their ways of doing as cultural standards, politically neutral and assimilable to those of any other contemporary art museum in the world.
2 ‘Contact zones’ is the term coined by Mary Louise Pratt with which she refers to the intermediate spaces of negotiation between two cultures. We owe the knowledge of this term to the project so titled that Aída Sánchez de Serdio, Daniel García and Javier Rodrigo launched in 2010 from La Virreina, Centre de la Imatge.
3 Among other reasons because such a thing is impossible since every conversation, however innocent it may seem, is crossed by power relations.
