Joan Pallé

The project “Reject Reductionism, Embrace Complexity” has been specially produced by the Barcelona Historical Archive, Casa de l’Ardiaca, and proposes a reflection on the history of the building and its contents to examine the aesthetic and political strategies used in discourse production. It challenges the logic of binary thinking and promotes an understanding of reality through complexity.

The project title plays on the classic Instagram meme “Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition”, which has been used across the political spectrum of internet culture, from the alt-right to anarcho-primitivism.

In one of the historical rooms of the archive, still in use, there is a sculpture that seeks to rethink the idea of the vitrine as a device not only for preserving printed material but also for producing discourse.The artwork contains replicas of materials from the archive’s collection of clandestine magazines. During the dictatorship, oppositional materials, underground press, and magazines published in exile reached the archive. The archive workers hid these documents to prevent them from being confiscated by the authorities. This led to the creation of a secret archive within the main archive, which the archivists referred to as “l’infern” (The Inferno). Some of these magazines were anonymously delivered to the archive via the famous mailbox at the entrance of the building, designed by Domènech i Montaner (1848–1932), one of the most prominent figures of Modernisme, the famous Catalan architectural movement. A partially enlarged reproduction of this mailbox has been created for this exhibition and is displayed in another historical room.

These two sculptures revisit the visual and sculptural materials of the building and the archive, representing two opposing ends of the political spectrum that shape the city’s historical identity and have helped define its complex reality. On one hand, the aesthetics of Catalan architecture of Modernisme, associated with the Catalan upper bourgeoisie of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; on the other, the radical left movements that emerged during the same period. The exhibition compels us to inhabit a space between these two extremes, unable to avoid being paradoxically drawn to and influenced by both.