Genealogy of the Lenin tribune, 2017

Cube: 120 x 120 x 120 cm.
Wood, methacrylate, sandstone.
Print on rice paper.

In the 1920s, the Russian artist El Lissitzky designed, together with his students, a project for a tribune for Lenin. Although this tribune was never built, its design consisted of a cubic concrete base on which was erected an inclined metal structure that supported a platform at a great height. Genealogy of the Lenin tribune reproduces to real scale the cubic base of the tribune, incorporating in one of its corners a small cube or transparent urn of 20 cm³. Inside this small cube is an original splinter from the column of Simeon the Stylite. The relic comes from his shrine in Aleppo, Syria. Simeon was a fifth century anchorite who lived for thirty-seven years on top of a column.

Although Lenin and Simeon come from seemingly antagonistic realities, one material and the other spiritual, they share more similarities than might appear. As Nechaev points out in his Revolutionary Catechism, a title that evidences this convergence, “the revolutionary should have neither private interests, nor private affairs, nor feelings, nor friendships, nor belongings.” Thus, the revolutionary, like the monk with his religious vow, surrenders his life to a higher cause or ideal and undergoes different degrees of suffering similar to those of asceticism. In this way, prison replaces the monastic cell, hunger strike replaces fasting, sexual abstinence replaces celibacy and torture replaces mortification. This is why Simeon will achieve his pathos by addressing God as man and Lenin will address men as God.

_______

Exhibition:
El 85% de la matèria.
Curatorship: Caterina Almirall
Can Palauet. Mataró. From 9 June to 29 July 2018.