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eing shown at art exhibitions, providing materials for local
research workers, doing jobs for the community from public
institutions to social groups, ‘manufacturing’ objects, etc., etc.
Perhaps the black and red laboratories that were developed
under the aegis of the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía
(UNIA arteypensamiento) in Seville and Granada may have
been the greatest effort to extend the archive, and the balance
sheet was very positive. For F.X. Archive, of course. The archive
is a place where discourses of all kinds intersect, and there is
room for a iconoclastic analysis of the strategies of the antiglobalisation
movement like the one proposed by the people
from La Fiambrera de Sevilla, and a rereading of Christianity –
one of the joys F.X. Archive has given me is the recovery of certain
narratives of Christian art, in the style of Zizek and his reading
of the Pauline Agape or Toni Negri and his valuation of the
Franciscan crowds – like the ones done, each in his own way,
by Julio Jara, Miguel Benlloch or Alberto Baraya.
So the intention of F.X. Archive would be to propose new
forms of participation, to broaden its field of work, to increase its
spheres of presence, to practise an active criticism towards its forms
and its modes, etc.
Earlier I listed those different meanings the F.X. of the Archive
may have. Perhaps I can put some examples in that casuistry.
As ‘X Files’ or archive of the unknown, of the occult, of the lost,
the archive digs up documents, data or images that can be
used; are being used in many of the works that challenge the
revisionism to which, for example, the history of the Republic,
the Revolution and the bloody coup d’état, with their corresponding
three-year war, are being subjected. I am referring to challenges
to the texts of César Vidal or Pío Moa, the identification of their
sources in Fascist propaganda, a denunciation of their falsifications
or monuments to stupidity. Vidal’s text concerning the Chekas
de Madrid was a piece of nonsense illustrated with images of
the Barcelona chekas, which did not do his crony any favours,
as he in turn had no choice but to cut down on the illustrations
when it came to his book on the Barcelona chekas.
There is that definition as ‘special effects’, the F.X. that refers
to pyrotechnic, sound or visual effects in films or on television,
also in the theatre and even at political demonstrations. I think
that the different seminars, in particular Laboratorio TV, shed a
good deal of light on those matters, especially when analysing
certain ways of showing low intensity street vandalism or the
relations with the religious images that occur in Seville and
which, as I said earlier, have been judicialised. F.X. Archive has
managed to collaborate on some of those dossiers, providing
historical data in the defence of those cases, helping to construct
a framework of knowledge of those issues, which would remove
the idea of hounding the victims as scapegoats. Even in zones
of more distant meaning, the debate on copyright, the s communal,
the hassles with SGAE or VEGAP and the adoption of copyleft
licences or creative commons, even in those areas there have
been certain modest contributions from the handling of materials
and tools of the F.X. Archive.
For the third of the definitions, the function of x, f(x), I have
fewer words. I could not really say how the works operate on
reality, although their political goal is none other than that
operation. The point is to return certain practices, certain kinds
of knowledge with which F.X. Archive operates, to the communal
domain, not forgetting that the ground where those speculations
move is in continuous transformation, moving towards the
undiscovered, the uncertain, the indeterminate. But I wonder to
what extent a series of images, pastimes, organisations, actions,
participations, games, languages, associations, noises, etc. can
amount to a meaningful political action, for all we talk about
the unknown, the anonymous, the nameless, that which does
not allow itself to be read.
Working from the public spaces, but perhaps a public less
atomised than the present one, where the public space / private space
separation has led to a loss of social cohesion. Would the point be
to recover truly communal spaces, capable of carrying on a genuine
civic (ethical and political) activity, while recovering less rigid forms
of association, more flexible in their composition, more involved in
the public flow, like the spaces for celebrations, recreational gatherings,
festivals?
There is a concept of civil society strongly marked by that
French Jacobin idea that needs to be qualified. For example,
I work in Seville, where civil society has a major presence through
organisms that are debatable, many basically reactionary, but
which had and still have a great lobbying capacity. There are
a series of mysteriously organised channels, so that you see
the movements of the politicians, of the people who soon come
to work in power, in art circles, and how they have to begin to
infiltrate those spaces of representation, which are not political
spaces, but the celebrations of some brotherhood or other,
the stalls at the fair. I am very interested in the model during the
Republic, the avant-garde artists worked inside, the rite in itself
was not regarded as perverse, people thought it could be given
the contents the communicants wanted. For example, many people
wonder why Seville appears in the Dada manifestos. I have been
able to check that the Dadaist groups operated almost like an
Easter Week Brotherhood. José Miguel Sánchez, the last modern
artist who officially did the great emblems of the city for the
Republic and illustrated avant-garde magazines, worked with
the Hermandad de los Negritos.
Along the same lines, I am interested in the realisation also
studied by Manuel Delgado in his book Carrer, festa i revolta,
which also appears as one of the mechanisms for creating meaning
in F.X. Archive, and which is the overlap between the strategies
for occupation of the city in celebrations and uprisings.
Iconoclasm is produced by the triumph of the phantasm,
it is a moment of transfer between reality and terror, between
the space of rhetoric and the space of reality. The iconoclast
himself undertakes one of the most religious acts in existence.
Remember the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. The first great
burning in Barcelona began after an afternoon of bullfighting
following an argument about a bad fight. Or the fact that in
Spain more people die from celebrations than from terrorism.
The political demonstration systems repeat the festive strategies.
When one makes an archaeology of the violence in the workers’
movement, the systems of aggression and confrontation with
the police have to do with strategies learned from celebrations.
Giorgio Agamben says that the political state of emergency is
the same as the carnival, operates the same way as when the
time of Lent is suspended: structural violence works the same in
the festive cycle as in the repressive cycle.
And an inevitable question; in the light of the global events
that are defining the twenty-first century: iconoclasm, a form of
resistance or the road to a ‘new world order’?
The New York business happened while I was collecting
documents for F.X. Archive... That day I was in a tavern with
friends, we were waiting for El Gitano de Oro – a poetry reciter
who used to accompany Pepe Marchena at times – and they
pointed to the television. The images were tremendous, we were
all stupefied staring at the screen, but what surprised me was
the speed with which everyone in the bar started making jokes
about what they were seeing. Then I spent the afternoon in the
Canal Sur recording studios, mixing a soundtrack, H, on the
subject of the atom bomb in the Cádiz carnival. One of the pieces,
an extract from Pericón de Cádiz’s story about the explosion in
the Cádiz naval arsenal in 1947 contained different images: heaps
of twisted iron, bodies flying... Everyone had us confused with
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