Olga Olivera-Tabeni
 

Monuments and public commemorative architectures – often grand and ostentatious – are frequently outdated privileged elements in the staging of power. With clear references to classicism, they are often used by the powerful themselves to boast and spread their ideas. It's a force that is often heavily masculinized, primarily linked to totalitarian regimes and fascism. Architectures where lichens, mosses, and what we call weeds grow, which we tend to eliminate, such as in the inconvenient and undesirable discolorations and patinas. Yet, when viewed from a different perspective, they can be seen as stains, paintings created by nature itself, undermining and discomforting the machinery of the state. By disrupting these natural forms, these elements transform into counter-monuments, turning into anti-power symbols, becoming war machines. Another way of visualizing a subsistence territory that undermines the State.

"Monuments and other defiant forms" is also a mosaic, a showcase of these forms, stains, or guerrilla paintings that are resilient, capable of breaking systems, just as with the remnants of buildings or monuments of figures like Franco, which unfortunately still persist in our landscape. Like a table or a box full of tools for action, lichens in guerrilla mode, in insurrection, our ecological and molecular weapons.

 

Link project photos