L'entrada a un bosc

Among the many forms of public commemoration, the installation of plaques and memorial tablets stands out for its discretion. Cut in stone, cast in metal or fired in ceramic, plaques are the least monumental of monuments – and perhaps for that very reason, absorbed as they are into façades, squares and streets without altering their appearance, we live alongside them unthinkingly and without paying them much attention. Plaques almost always carry a text: their purpose is to inform. What appears in writing – dates, names and events – restores past uses to buildings and conjures improbable scenes in landscapes: where no material traces remain, words take their place. This is what happens with the homes of notable figures and, more broadly, in places where something significant occurred. With just a few words, a plaque endows a public space with meaning and, when read, weaves the memory of that place into the fabric of everyday life. Yet when it comes to memory – and just as with statues – there is nothing neutral about the installation or removal of plaques: both serve a particular agenda. When Joan Brossa included the poem “Monument barceloní” (Barcelona Monument) in his collection Calcomanies [Decals], he did so precisely to allow us to read the transcription of one among many texts chiselled onto commemorative plaques. The plaque had been installed in 1941 in what is now the Plaça de Maria Cristina in Barcelona, recording the death in combat of a group of pilots from the Condor Legion who had fought on the Francoist side during the Spanish Civil War. By transcribing the text and bringing it onto the page, Brossa dissects the monument as though it were a specimen prepared for examination and offers it up for study. This “textual recovery” reflects his interest in allowing reality to enter the poem – though against the grain. The poem performs a forensic function: it lends credibility to what might at first seem fictional and becomes a reflection not only of the political sphere but of the daily lives of ordinary citizens. In the case of “Monument barceloní”, it also becomes a record of public space – an inventory of the elements that shape it and of their propagandistic, commemorative or even coercive uses. L’entrada a un bosc [The Entrance to a Forest], the second exhibition in the series Digues, cosa. Joan Brossa i els poemes objecte [Say, Thing. Joan Brossa and His Object Poems], takes as its starting point two object poems that Brossa conceived as acts of homage – though, despite their commemorative nature, they might equally be described as counter-monuments. Firstly, because they move away from the narrative and formal grandiloquence of conventional monuments, and secondly, because they contribute to restoring the memory of victims rather than celebrating victors. To underscore this inversion, the exhibition brings together sculptural, photographic and sound works by artists who, in addressing the notions of remembrance, permanence and absence, eschew the epic and monolithic formalism. If monuments are often conceived as sutures in an official narrative – one that is made and remade yet claims permanence – the works gathered in L’entrada a un bosc expose the excesses and omissions of that narrative. Questions of pacifism and memory become structural concerns, yet many of the works present anatomical, organic and vegetal motifs. By bringing bodies, flowers, forests and bodily fluids into the frame, the exhibition invokes a tenacious vitality whilst at the same time making of these representations a sign of vulnerability and of passive resistance.