The Catalan artists of the Venice Art Biennale reveal the fine print of history

BarcelonaArtists have the ability to reveal the hidden stories in the most everyday objects and in almost invisible details. Thus, Clàudia Pagès represents Catalonia and the Balearic Islands at the next Venice Art Biennale with Paper tears, a macro-installation forged from 15th-century watermarks found at the Capellades Paper Mill Museum. Watermarks, also known as filigrees, are used to identify the maker of a paper and who commissioned it. Throughout history, there have been some as simple as a cross, but also more elaborate ones, such as a coat of arms or images of real or fantastic animals. "I am not a historian; I use history during research, and I make it my own through writing and performance", says Clàudia Pagès, who is also the author of the novel Més de dues aigües (Empúries). "I use history during research – she adds –. I am a writer and a performer, and I make history my own through a mix of visual arts and writing".

During the research process, Pagès detected that the silk road and the paper road were the same, that the paper importers were the Muslim population, and that the expulsions affected paper production. "I've taken the project as a way to confront a very harsh present, to look it in the face. The moments in our history that were very violent have helped me understand the current situation, with genocides, with expulsions, and also the fact that Catalonia is becoming increasingly Islamophobic", says Pagès. "In Venice, we look at the 15th-century watermarks from the archive of the Capellades Paper Mill Museum. They are very naive drawings: there are dogs, unicorns, ships... They look like they were made by small children. But when you look at what happened the year they were made, it was all barbarity", explains the artist.

The other Catalan artist at this Art Biennale is Oriol Vilanova, who will represent Spain with the project Les restes. Vilanova is best known for the presentations of his immense postcard collection, which he buys by the thousands in flea markets. Les restes will include more than 50,000 of the hundreds of thousands he has at present. Years ago, Pagès also worked with the social dynamics of flea markets. "I lived next to Encants, next to a meeting place for hauliers. They were my friends, and they explained to me how everything worked. I was interested in the oral part, the circulation of goods, and all the slang that came out of there," says Vilanova.

An object loaded with meaning

For Oriol Vilanova, the title of Les restes is a metaphor for the materials with which he works. "Flea markets are these spaces for digesting history where objects arrive, as if it were the last party before their destruction," explains Vilanova. "Objects are there like the remains of society – he adds –, of all societies, because in fact flea markets are present in all cultures." Regarding postcards, he points out that it is about working with a material "forgotten by history" and giving it new life. Forgotten, but not harmless: "The postcard seems like a trivial object but it is very loaded with meaning and is crossed by history, by all histories. It is not a neutral object, but quite the opposite," states Vilanova. "What is interesting is how the gaze transforms images that apparently have no political content: in the pavilion there will be an aerial image, one of snow, and a third of fog that connects them with a language of landscape, and in reality it could be an image edited during Francoism," explains Vilanova. In other cases, there are images that can be related to Belgian colonialism in the Congo and gender clichés. "The postcard is an object that has metabolized the world, that has eaten it, that has integrated it," he emphasizes.

The remains are curated by Carles Guerra, who organized a major Vilanova exhibition when he directed the then Tàpies Foundation. "It was one of the first times we created a very specific setup to present the collection, which is never the complete collection. Quantity is a somewhat vague issue. You can say it's a lot, but a lot compared to what?" says Carles Guerra. Now they find themselves in a very different scenario again, both in terms of place and architecture, and in terms of the evolution of the collection. "The collection is an entity that has a life of its own, and then, in each presentation, the collection somehow decides to go in one direction or another. In reality, what interests me is the idea of collecting. Sometimes it's from my own collection, sometimes it's in collections from other museums, sometimes it's collaboration with private collectors," says Vilanova. For Guerra, the change has to do with politics as an element that legitimizes contemporary art. "We are in a moment when artistic proposals are required to be political in places like the Venice Art Biennale, as is. What politics is there here? I always say there is an economy. The art world is a world heavily marked by all of neoliberalism, by the production of difference and the production of exponential value. Oriol's work takes refuge in a very humble, very subsidiary market, where he finds a space for circulation, a space for collectivity," concludes Guerra.