TO LOSE YOUR HEAD - CATALONIA IN VENICE

A collective artist book, published by Tenov Books, which includes various written and artistic reflections on the exhibition's theme. The artists David Bestué, Lúa Coderch, Lola Lasurt, Daniela Ortiz, Perejaume and Francesc Torres collaborated in the book. The pieces and the texts present in this publication complement the exhibition and create a dialogue with it. It is like a long visual and textual essay that poses questions about iconoclasm and icondulism from the point of views of doing, of creating, constructing a counterpoint to Pedro Azara's theoretical and historical discourse. Sometimes this counterpoint enriches the discourse and sometimes it overflows it from the world of contemporary art.

David Bestué connects to architecture and art work of the past with a certain devotion, but, as you can glean from his text, he does it in a very natural way, free of nostalgia, from a present continuous. At the exhibition, Rosi Amor, which he presented at MNCARS, the artist displayed pieces made with resin (like the ones in the book) that contained dust from other elements. This process allowed him to give new shapes to historical sculptures.

Lúa Coderch created the piece, The Magic Mountain, a plausible story about one of the most venerated architectural icons in the 20th century: the Barcelona pavilion of 1929. The Mies van de Rohe building relived through photo offerings made by tourists, or from a reconstruction, an inflated version, of the famous onyx wall. In this publication she also presents a mainly textual piece that questions the comparison of all works of art with the monument, and patriarchal heroic verticals, at the same as discussing magic and tricks that the artist uses.

The work of Lola Lasurt also presents a certain ambivalence, somewhere between distance and worship, with pieces from the past. Exercise of Rhythm uses journalistic fragments (published after the assassination of Francesc Layret in 1920) and put them in the mouths of the four sculptures that were erected in honour of the politician. The piece presented in the book closes a project that began in 2010 with a movie that alluded to a story of love and heartbreak between the four statues, and that converted the inanimate figures that form the monument into desiring subjects.

Throughout his career, Francesc Torres has repeatedly worked with the idea of destruction, fascinated by crashed cars, devastation caused by war, and the rubble of the World Trade Center skyscrapers. His work speaks about collective memory and looks to awaken critical reflection. In the book Francesc Torres visits some statues in Berlin, St. Petersburg and Barcelona that have been attacked, and thus opens up the geographic reach of this exhibition. His piece is called, precisely, Lose your head.

Daniela Ortiz works from a belief in the power of the totem and the conviction that an image is power, whether it be a photo shared on social media or a museum piece. They are never politically neutral. The work she presents in the book hopes to raise awareness, stating that the survival of a colonial icon in the middle of Barcelona has connections to Catalan immigration policies.

Perejaume decided to write without any images, in order to give them a rest, and because we don't need the to explain the intimate relationship that links artists to their work, both solemn and relaxed at the same time. In this text and in his last book, Bring a Maredédeus to the Dance, he talks lucidly and ironically about wanting and the subjectivity of icons.

In addition, the book documents the Catalan monuments that will visit Venice, accompanied by interventions from the filmmaker Albert García-Alzórriz along with the poet Gabriel Ventura, the playwright Marcel Borràs, and the architect Tiziano Schürch.