Page 166 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

166 ¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER
the builders’ welfare. Recounting the story of the first generation of engineers, who started work on the Tower and then delayed it, knowing it would never end, Laura addresses the public in German, Swiss-German, Spanish, Catalan, Chinese, English, Italian, and French, enacting Babel itself as an eternal present.
This speech is delivered when the parade of mobile contraptions and dwellings on wheels comes to a halt before a cardboard wall, which is decorated with an endlessly repeated screen- printed motif: balconies and doorways to buildings in the style of the bland modernity characterizing the seaside hotels found everywhere along the Mediterranean coast, occasional destinations for international tourist routes that also encapsulate a kind of modernism with no pedigree, an architectural language of lethargic leisure and the promise of happiness under the sun. A futile, yet protest-like, action takes place at the wall: Laura hands out the plastic containers and a bucket brigade carries water and pours it over the fake façades again and again. This then leads to a rave party, with the whole group absorbed by music and convulsive dancing. The music and the countercultural gathering belong to the domain of anarchy or chaotic models portending alternative forms of collective life.
Another scene featuring the same group of people was shot at the Terramar Autodrome in Sant Pere de Ribes (Barcelona), an old disused racetrack dating back to the golden age of car races in 1923. This concrete speedway meant for motor vehicles is traversed on foot by two characters who chat about the wind’s impact on their actions as they walk. They pass by random people holding banners and flags signalling heights and distances from cities in other latitudes, which entails a kind of navigational rupture with what exists: Measurements are control mechanisms based on reference points, normally some trade hub or power axis. Here, by contrast, the frame of reference, the political system’s geographical coordinate par excellence, becomes deconstructed even as its prime indicator turns out to be a thoroughly singular human action in a science-fictional nowhere space.
In the same racing circuit, monumental cardboard façades propped onto wheeled scaffoldings, from the same family as the above mentioned screen-printed wall, are moved about by assistants, thus becoming mobile auto-buildings. In their surrealism, they remind us of the comic reshuffling of the stage