Project in Residency Falconetti Peña

/ Exhibition War, insubmission, art /

/ FILMOTECA DE CATALUNYA /

/ CRIPPLES OF WAR AND NORMALITY /

/ PATRIOTISM AND COLONIZATION /

/ YOU WILL DIE AS HEROES /

/ PAMPHLET AND REVOLUTION /

WAR, INSUBMISSION, ART

Project in Residency Falconetti Peña

In 1924, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the end of World War I, Otto Dix published his work The War, composed of fifty engravings in which he denounced warmongering with a harshness that had not been seen until then. A century earlier, Goya, a painter who inspired Otto Dix, produced The Disasters of War. And now, one hundred years later, a cruel and senseless war is once again being fought in Europe.

Otto Dix is located between two times, Goya's and ours. The project for this exhibition/intervention is to take his engravings as a starting point for a journey through the art that has rebelled against war slogans.

Goya, Dix, Grosz, Arntz, Watkins and many other artists defied the prevailing aesthetic order by creating works of enormous relevance. To do so, they used modest formats, the engraving, the poster, the mimeographed magazine, the pamphlet, the false documentary, the only ones they could access in times of censorship and blockade. These are works that managed to last against all odds, as there were many who were interested in making them disappear.

Thanks to them, today we can follow the trail of those who in their day disobeyed the patriotic slogans, maintaining the flame of resistance to the war madness.

The project will cover various spaces and historical periods, combining different formats, pictorial, graphic and audiovisual.

The idea is to contrast them, face to face, with the messages of those who at the time bet on galvanizing the warrior ardor of the masses.

He asked me: “Ms Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children? (...). Pause. I look inside me for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza. Patience has just escaped me. Pause. Smile. We teach life, sir! (...) These are not two equal sides: occupier and occupied. And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead. (...) Is anybody out there? Will anyone listen? I wish I could wail over their bodies. I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn't have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do. (...) Today my body was a TV’d massacre. We teach life, sir. We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.”

Simon decided to record Barry delivering a monologue exploring US imperialism and the project for the new American century. This speech became the focal point around which animation was constructed. "what Barry says" is very much a response to Simon witnessing his peer's apparent lack of interest in the anti-war marchers between the attack on Afghanistan and the second gulf war. Many young Londoners seemed to feel that they could do nothing to stop the attack on Iraq, so why bother

On August 6th and 9th, 1945, two atomic bombs vaporized 210,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who survived are called “hibakusha” -people exposed to the bomb- and there are an estimated 200,000 living today. Today, with the threat of nuclear weapons of mass destruction frighteningly real -the world's arsenal capable of repeating the destruction at Hiroshima 400,000 times over-, filmmaker Steven Okazaki revisits the bombings and shares the stories of the only people to have survived a nuclear attack.

A documentary that examines America's policies regarding making war, most recently the Iraq war and what is termed “the Bush doctrine”, which includes pre-emptive strikes. The author suggests that this policy has been in the works for many years, reviewing past wars in the 20th century. A variety of individuals are asked “Why de we fight?” and, predictably, come up with a variety of answers. This is followed by a look at today's U.S. military/industrial complex via interviews with individuals involved in it.

5 years into the war in Iraq, there is no end in sight. 200 US soldiers meet outside of Washington DC, sharing first-hand accounts of the war on-the-ground and of growing GL resistance.