Displaced Architecture. Burial, 2010

Single-channel HD video, 13 min. Editing and production: Rafa Ruiz.
Editing by 3 + 2 P. A.

The video Displaced Architecture. Burial shows how an excavator digs a hole in the old racetrack of the Canódromo Meridiana (Canodrome Meridiana) in Barcelona to bury a model of the Casa de Estudios para Artistas (Artists’ House of Studies). This building, in addition to being an architectural landmark due to its formal and conceptual singularity, can be considered the first modern architecture built in Spanish exile (1). In the words of its author, Antoni Bonet, who set up his home in one of his seven workshops, “the building aims to create a small centre for artists from different disciplines to meet”.

 The Canódromo, also by Bonet, was built between 1962 and 1963 to hold greyhound races and was remodelled in 2010 to become an art centre. Due to various political decisions, the project was cancelled and only one exhibition was held: Canòdrom 00.00.00, of which this work was part. Despite this, and although very briefly, we can say that both buildings were intertwined by art, but also by another important link: the Casa de Estudios para Artistas was the first architecture Bonet produced in exile and the Canódromo, the first after his definitive return to Spain.

With the burial of this model, the aim is to symbolically return to Barcelona an architecture that was “banished” by the vicissitudes of the Civil War, highlighting the cruel invisibility and silence suffered by Republican exiles during the Franco dictatorship and the early years of democracy. This is why Displaced Architecture. Burial is constituted as a monument in reverse, of which no sign or mark has been left of its location, but also as an act of entropic metamorphosis from which, and from the decomposition of that utopian architecture that placed art at the centre, a new becoming can take place.

(1) The Catalan architect Antoni Bonet Castellana went into exile in Buenos Aires in 1938 as a result of the Spanish Civil War.

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Exhibition:
Canòdrom 00.00.00.
Canòdrom Centre d’Art. CoNCA. Barcelona. From 13 April to 23 May 2010

Exhibition:
Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis
Valle Ortí Gallery. Valencia. From 3 to 31 October 2013.

Viewing:
Transit is Passage I. Video Art Cycle.
IVAM. Valencia. 18 January 2015.