Dynamic fragmentation of Antonov-Ovseenko’s bunker, 2014

Diptych: 118 x 310 cm.
Photograph (digital print) mounted on wood, 118 x 210 cm.
Cement, wood, 118 x 100 cm.

This project consists of a diptych that includes a group of photographs showing the interior of a bunker built in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and a bas-relief evoking a Suprematist composition.

The bunker is located in the basement of the residence that housed the Consulate of the Soviet Union and was built to protect the USSR consul, Antonov-Ovseenko. Walking through the bunker, one experiences an eerie, almost phantasmagorical feeling that connects with the biography of Ovseenko, hero of the 1917 Revolution. Ovseenko was requested by Stalin in Moscow because of his unconventional stance on the Events of May 1937. After being tried in the Great Purge, he was accused of being a Trotskyist agent and sentenced to death.

The work seeks to deconstruct the “Stalinist materialism” represented by the bunker as an act of political and historical redemption. To this end, a previously constructed model of the bunker has been dismantled and its pieces glued onto a flat surface, thus imitating a suprematist spatial construction. With this symbolic action, the aim is to return the bunker to the zero point or “original feeling” imagined by Malevich, coinciding with the beginning of the Russian Revolution.

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Exhibition:
Stratos
Rosa Santos Gallery. Valencia. From 16 January to 20 February 2015.