English Texts

FOREWORD
On 26 January 2006 Fundació Antoni Tàpies presented the exhibition
F.X. Archive: The Empty City. Community, a project by Pedro G.
Romero. It was a key work for our institution, because it continues
the reflections we began some years ago and marks a step forward
for our future project.
Six years earlier, on 21 January 2000, Fundació Antoni
Tàpies presented the work of Renée Green, an author who adopts
a critical approach to historiographical practices: she looks for new
directions for representing the past in the present, poses questions
about power, context, reception and meaning, reveals hidden
meanings, reorganises or recontextualises artefacts. Her installations,
normally related to the places where she works, question dominant
modes of construction of the past and definition of the present,
while trying to retrieve submerged histories or meanings.
Working in and with the different places where art happens –
the social and political contexts where the works are generated, as
well as the space where they are presented – is a constant practice
in the work of Pedro G. Romero. In this approach by F.X. Archive
to the present time, The Empty City project, the object-subject of
study is a town near Barcelona, Badia del Vallès.
For the Fundació Antoni Tàpies project, working with contexts
has also been fundamental; such is the case of Contemporary Arab
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
1900-2025, directed by Joan Roca i Albert. Places and times
where we are still working, trying, like Pedro G. Romero in Badia
del Vallès, to open up the political space where it has been closed
down and to develop new tools for telling stories which provide
new ways of seeing.
In November 2001 we opened the exhibition of the work of
Hans-Peter Feldmann, an artist who is interested in popular culture
and the popularisation of culture, family archives, the construction
of the past in the present, and a critical attitude to the consumer
society and authorship in the world of art. An author for whom irony,
distance and humour, but also the relationship between life and
death, are the vectors which generate personal narratives, where
different times are conjugated.
Pedro G. Romero’s work is masterly in the incorporation of the
popular, which he places at the centre of philosophical, artistic or
political disquisitions and debates. There are magnificent examples
in the work on Badia del Vallès, related not only to flamenco, but
also to festivals, rites and their images, everyday human relations
or communal city life.
Attention to popular culture is and has been one of the constants
of the Foundation through projects such as Fernando Bryce or
Sutures and Fragments. Territories and Bodies in Science Fiction,
devoted to science fiction films and literature, and possibly as a
transfer of the artistic practice of Antoni Tàpies himself, always
concerned with the contraries and contradictions between high and
low culture.
To review essential and/or marginal projects in the construction
of aesthetic modernity is a tendency that has been a feature of Pedro
G. Romero’s work and has also been one of our goals, with the
presentation of authors like Lygia Clark, Mangelos, Isidoro Valcárcel
Medina or Asger Jorn. All of them are agitators in different disciplines
and parts of the world, aware of the relation every human being
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
the stereotyped view of history and to understand the present.
Of ends and origins, of vernacular cultures and popular history,
Pedro G. Romero also knows a great deal since, as he says, in his
work he ‘sets the archive dancing’, does an exercise of recovery of
memory, animating a series of images through gestures, breaking
the archive to try to include what is missing, the vestige, according
to Giorgio Agamben, the trace, according to Michael Foucault.
Alongside those authors the references for this F.X. Archive project
include, among many others, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin and
Georges Bataille, authors who also worked on historical time through
signs, quotes, juxtapositions of images to reinterpret events, to
uncover what remains between the images, in short, to write new
narrations.
From Chris Marker to Enthusiasm, not forgetting the Archive
Cultures project, the practices of the use of the archive, its potential
as a generator of new fictions and stories, its infinite possibilities
of returning and forgetting, have been a feature of our programme.
Lastly, I would like to mention the co-operative side of Pedro
G. Romero’s work, which in this project can be appreciated both
in the prolonged intellectual associations with authors like
Enrique Vila-Matas, Juan José Lahuerta, Manuel Delgado or Valentín
Roma – the person who took us and helped us understand life
on the estates better – and his work uncovering the social fabrics
of the communities where he works, in this case Badia del Vallès.
For the Foundation this task is also one of its lines of force: to
look for parallel voices which punctuate and accompany our work
and to develop links with other institutions that generate contemporary
culture, such as Constant, Kunstwerke, Arteleku, BNV and UNIA
arteypensamiento.
F.X. Archive: The Empty City. Politics
The book to which this is the introduction is the sediment of a long
process of research and, like the exhibition it accompanied, involves
one more materialisation of F.X. Archive.
In the exhibition space, the scaffolding structure extended
that metaphor of the archive staged and in motion, since one could
literally go in and out, up and down through the different files,
which made up a data base: seven entries in F.X. Archive understood
as key words – FEKS, Wandlung, Premature Architectures, Pasolini,
Ute Meta Bauer, Descoberta da linha orgânica, Capital – gave
way to a series of images, texts, pastimes, actions, noises, games,
groupings, etc., which allowed each visitor to create his own
particular text, interacting and composing his own performance, as
Pedro G. Romero reminded us in the leaflet: ‘In a mise-en-scène
that is drama and gesture at the same time, visual constructions
of all kinds are brought into play and administer a different way of
uttering discourse in which the gestural values of the theatre
subtract exhibition value from the works… In that sense, the theatre
is a tool with which to present the works as a “place composition”,
acting as the choreography of a mental theatre… Although the
space is constructed with the materials on show, they do not point
to the finished work, their purpose is not that moment; rather it
is to sketch intermediation operations, they rather make each thing
a medium…’
The book in turn compiles all the materials and takes up the
idea of subtracting exhibition value from the things, while reaffirming
the textual meaning of the whole project and the non-semiotic
elements that overflow from it. The page, edited and laid out,
replaces the architecture of scaffolding and allows another sequence,
another arrangement, another stage and other itineraries.
Nuria Enguita Mayo
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
project, for the preparation of this conversation we have used many sources and some
earlier interviews, and in particular the one by Pilar Parcerisas published in Papers d’Art,
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
in 2004, and the transcriptions of the public sessions of Laboratorio T.V. and Laboratorio
Sevilla which F.X. Archive made in 2004 with UNIA arteypensamiento.
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