Documenti di Didattica
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Documenti di Cultura
The present collection of texts in English is a part of the total content of the F.X. Archive: The Empty City. Politics
FOREWORD the archive to try to include what is missing, the vestige, according
to Giorgio Agamben, the trace, according to Michael Foucault.
On 26 January 2006 Fundació Antoni Tàpies presented the exhibition Alongside those authors the references for this F.X. Archive project
F.X. Archive: The Empty City. Community, a project by Pedro G. include, among many others, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin and
Romero. It was a key work for our institution, because it continues Georges Bataille, authors who also worked on historical time through
the reflections we began some years ago and marks a step forward signs, quotes, juxtapositions of images to reinterpret events, to
for our future project. uncover what remains between the images, in short, to write new
Six years earlier, on 21 January 2000, Fundació Antoni narrations.
Tàpies presented the work of Renée Green, an author who adopts From Chris Marker to Enthusiasm, not forgetting the Archive
a critical approach to historiographical practices: she looks for new Cultures project, the practices of the use of the archive, its potential
directions for representing the past in the present, poses questions as a generator of new fictions and stories, its infinite possibilities
about power, context, reception and meaning, reveals hidden of returning and forgetting, have been a feature of our programme.
meanings, reorganises or recontextualises artefacts. Her installations, Lastly, I would like to mention the co-operative side of Pedro
normally related to the places where she works, question dominant G. Romero’s work, which in this project can be appreciated both
modes of construction of the past and definition of the present, in the prolonged intellectual associations with authors like
while trying to retrieve submerged histories or meanings. Enrique Vila-Matas, Juan José Lahuerta, Manuel Delgado or Valentín
Working in and with the different places where art happens – Roma – the person who took us and helped us understand life
the social and political contexts where the works are generated, as on the estates better – and his work uncovering the social fabrics
well as the space where they are presented – is a constant practice of the communities where he works, in this case Badia del Vallès.
in the work of Pedro G. Romero. In this approach by F.X. Archive For the Foundation this task is also one of its lines of force: to
to the present time, The Empty City project, the object-subject of look for parallel voices which punctuate and accompany our work
study is a town near Barcelona, Badia del Vallès. and to develop links with other institutions that generate contemporary
For the Fundació Antoni Tàpies project, working with contexts culture, such as Constant, Kunstwerke, Arteleku, BNV and UNIA
has also been fundamental; such is the case of Contemporary Arab arteypensamiento.
Representations directed by Catherine David, Urban Imaginaries
in Latin Americawith Armando Silva, or Barcelona in the exhibition
Tourisms: The Defeat of Dissent, and in the project Urban Majorities F.X. Archive: The Empty City. Politics
1900-2025, directed by Joan Roca i Albert. Places and times
where we are still working, trying, like Pedro G. Romero in Badia The book to which this is the introduction is the sediment of a long
del Vallès, to open up the political space where it has been closed process of research and, like the exhibition it accompanied, involves
down and to develop new tools for telling stories which provide one more materialisation of F.X. Archive.
new ways of seeing. In the exhibition space, the scaffolding structure extended
In November 2001 we opened the exhibition of the work of that metaphor of the archive staged and in motion, since one could
Hans-Peter Feldmann, an artist who is interested in popular culture literally go in and out, up and down through the different files,
and the popularisation of culture, family archives, the construction which made up a data base: seven entries in F.X. Archive understood
of the past in the present, and a critical attitude to the consumer as key words – FEKS, Wandlung, Premature Architectures, Pasolini,
society and authorship in the world of art. An author for whom irony, Ute Meta Bauer, Descoberta da linha orgânica, Capital – gave
distance and humour, but also the relationship between life and way to a series of images, texts, pastimes, actions, noises, games,
death, are the vectors which generate personal narratives, where groupings, etc., which allowed each visitor to create his own
different times are conjugated. particular text, interacting and composing his own performance, as
Pedro G. Romero’s work is masterly in the incorporation of the Pedro G. Romero reminded us in the leaflet: ‘In a mise-en-scène
popular, which he places at the centre of philosophical, artistic or that is drama and gesture at the same time, visual constructions
political disquisitions and debates. There are magnificent examples of all kinds are brought into play and administer a different way of
in the work on Badia del Vallès, related not only to flamenco, but uttering discourse in which the gestural values of the theatre
also to festivals, rites and their images, everyday human relations subtract exhibition value from the works… In that sense, the theatre
or communal city life. is a tool with which to present the works as a “place composition”,
Attention to popular culture is and has been one of the constants acting as the choreography of a mental theatre… Although the
of the Foundation through projects such as Fernando Bryce or space is constructed with the materials on show, they do not point
Sutures and Fragments. Territories and Bodies in Science Fiction, to the finished work, their purpose is not that moment; rather it
devoted to science fiction films and literature, and possibly as a is to sketch intermediation operations, they rather make each thing
transfer of the artistic practice of Antoni Tàpies himself, always a medium…’
concerned with the contraries and contradictions between high and The book in turn compiles all the materials and takes up the
low culture. idea of subtracting exhibition value from the things, while reaffirming
To review essential and/or marginal projects in the construction the textual meaning of the whole project and the non-semiotic
of aesthetic modernity is a tendency that has been a feature of Pedro elements that overflow from it. The page, edited and laid out,
G. Romero’s work and has also been one of our goals, with the replaces the architecture of scaffolding and allows another sequence,
presentation of authors like Lygia Clark, Mangelos, Isidoro Valcárcel another arrangement, another stage and other itineraries.
Medina or Asger Jorn. All of them are agitators in different disciplines
and parts of the world, aware of the relation every human being Nuria Enguita Mayo
establishes with his origins, of the fact that a culture depends mainly
on what it can give, and most of all that we must truly know the
reality of the images of the past both to defend ourselves against We have included in the publication a conversation with the artist, which brings together
many of the ideas and thoughts that have given body to F.X. Archive. As in any collective
the stereotyped view of history and to understand the present.
project, for the preparation of this conversation we have used many sources and some
Of ends and origins, of vernacular cultures and popular history, earlier interviews, and in particular the one by Pilar Parcerisas published in Papers d’Art,
Pedro G. Romero also knows a great deal since, as he says, in his on the occasion of the project F.X. Archive. The Tragic Week, shown at the Centre d’Art
Santa Mónica in 2002; the one by David González Romero in no. 2 of Parabólica magazine
work he ‘sets the archive dancing’, does an exercise of recovery of in 2004, and the transcriptions of the public sessions of Laboratorio T.V. and Laboratorio
memory, animating a series of images through gestures, breaking Sevilla which F.X. Archive made in 2004 with UNIA arteypensamiento.
At the outset the project was associated with the idea of the From Hölderlin to a Cuban country song in which they sing:
‘end of art’, indeed it was presented that way, F.X. Archive on the End ‘Where danger grows, where danger grows, there too grows
of Art. At some time you even quoted Agamben: ‘According to the salvation.’ A journey around the fertile ground of images, at the
principle that states that only in a burning house is it possible to see very point where they end up vanishing, is certainly the high point
the fundamental architectural problem for the first time, so art, once of their appearance too.
it has reached the end of its journey, allows its original project to be In the absolute kingdom of the image, understood as a structure
seen.’ In what sense do you use the term ‘end’? Does it have anything or a flow that sums up the general concept of culture from Aby
to do with the impossibility of representation after Auschwitz and/or Warburg and Ernst Gombrich to Walter Benjamin or Guy Debord,
Hiroshima? How is the time frame established, how is it bounded? we should pause a moment at that complex nihilist phenomenon
that was the burning of churches and other religious places by
‘End’ appears in the twofold meaning of finish and also of the Spanish anarchist and socialist workers, with its historical,
purpose. The ‘end of art’ as one more sub-genre of art. A genre anthropological or artistic, political, religious or heritage implications.
that is related to the others in the same way that the vanitas A newspaper report describes Seville on 18 July 1936 in these
painting was related to the painting of still lifes. For many years words: ‘All night the city was lit up by the bonfires of the eight
I was preparing a project which reviewed all the movements of churches that were burning in the Macarena district. Day had not
meaning, which ranged from the cornucopia to the vanitas, a yet broken, since the sky was black and lowering, it seemed as
project that never saw the light of day, unless its expression is if it was about to collapse at any moment on top of us had it not
this F.X. Archive. In the relation with those materials, I discovered been held up by the columns of smoke that still rose from the
an obscure, forgotten character who fascinated me. Giovanni burning churches.’
Morelli developed a method of observation of the world, which The chronicle provides us with a significant image to try
I recognised, like no other until then, as close to my work, to to understand the current state of the arts, an image we can try to
what I was trying to make. His systems of signs, which at first read as if it were an emblem: the different fires would correspond
were nothing more than an auxiliary tool in the system of to the attempts of the different avant-gardes to put an end to
attributions of works of art, has become a main tool for art traditional art, to wit, the legends of Dadaism, Futurism or Russian
history (especially in the wake of Aby Warburg), anthropology, Constructivism. The smoke of those fires would correspond to most
semiotics, psychoanalysis: they even enabled the development of the art movements that appeared after 1945, which sprang
of the political sciences, which have led to the current system of from those fires. The black, lowering sky would describe the current
domain in the form of the panoptic. This method, which I discovered art scene, always about to collapse on top of us. For those of us
Contabilidad
Montse Márquez
Conservación técnica
Jesús Marull
Mònica Marull