Olga Olivera-Tabeni

Monuments and other unsubmissive spots. Petri dishes, lichens, mosses and weeds. Stones with lichens from the old military barracks of Gardeny de Lleida. Video. 19,21 min. 2020.
Public and commemorative monuments and architectures — usually large and pompous — are often obsolete privileged elements of the staging of power. With clear references to classicism, which are often used by power to boast and spread their ideas. Force always very masculinized, and especially linked to totalitarian regimes and fascism. Architectures where lichens, mosses and what we call weeds grow there, and which we tend to eliminate, such as in the uncomfortable and undesirable colors and patinas. But looked at differently, they can be stains, paintings created by nature itself, which undermine and disturb state machines. By breaking into these natural forms, the elements become against monuments, become anti-power, become war machines. Another visualization of a subsistence territory that undermines the state.
Monuments and other unsubmissive forms is also a mosaic, a showcase of these forms, stains or guerrilla paintings, resistant, which can break with the systems, as with the remains of Franco's buildings or monuments that unfortunately still persist throughout the territory. Like a table or a box, full of tools for action, lichens in guerrilla warfare, in insurrection, our ecological and molecular weapons.


