Anarxiu Diapo

The project Tot el que fem, ho fem per carregar-nos-ho tot—Everything We Do, We Do to Bring It All Down—begins with a set of now-obsolete slides that the artist, together with a group of students from the reception class at the Milà i Fontanals Secondary School in Barcelona. The very format of the slides, along with the deterioration caused by the passing of time, means they can no longer be used for the purpose they were originally created for: to explain the History of Art. And we write History of Art with a capital “H,” because the narrative constructed through these images—these specific ones—is one narrative, and not another. From here, a fundamental question arises: do other possible narratives exist? Can this set of images tell other stories that they were not initially meant to tell?

The artist retrieves and appropriates this obsolete material, but does not stop there. In an iconoclastic gesture, he intervenes in and manipulates these images: applying printing ink, using other broken slides as if they were spatulas or brushes, piercing their surfaces with different objects, destroying them. Everything We Do, We Do to Bring It All Down—yes, but we destroy everything in order to turn it into something else. The images resulting from this process become new images: some have lost all connection with their referent—rendered unrecognizable—while others preserve certain traces of what they once were.