AS WE BUILT NO BARRICADES
Digital rendering and photo-simulation, print on newsprint
Variable dimensions
2024 - ongoing
A barricade is a defensive structure, ephemeral in nature, usually erected in urban space during moments of revolt or struggle. The construction of a barricade marks the passage from everyday routine to a state of radical change, calling into question a normality taken for granted.
A barricade always arises from a strongly process-based development, determined by human relationships that exist a priori and those formed in the moment, intertwined by a shared desire to bring a space of struggle into being. In giving it material form, a multitude of different objects converge, taken from the urban fabric or made available by the participating crowd. Beyond signaling an imposed and necessary pause, the barricade allows for a rethinking of the ways a city is traversed, of its urban layout, and of its relational possibilities.
As a central object in the construction of dissent at both local and global levels, the barricade has taken on a strongly symbolic quality in the history of the representation of peoples in revolt. On the other hand, its concrete usefulness in the field as a defensive tool has waned, given the increasingly heavy equipment in the hands of law enforcement.
AS WE BUILT NO BARRICADES presents itself as an ongoing production of images of fictitious barricades. The character of this archive is highly site-specific, responding to the physical necessities of the locations into which these hyper-barricades are inserted.
These photographs are tools of hyperstition: self-fulfilling prophecies capable of materializing through their own narrative power. By visualizing possible scenarios of collective mobilization, the images engage questions of representation and the aestheticization of contemporary protest, mediated by digital systems, constructed and at the same time defused.
The fabrication of these photographs also activates a post-truth mechanism – that is, the narration of a truth no longer built through empirical facts, but starting from subjective, ideologically and emotionally charged points of view. In doing so, these fake barriers allow post-truth to be viewed as a possible tool of subversive imagination.
Barricades, even in their representative and two-dimensional form, continue to impose a “selective permeability,” allowing the crossing of the boundary only to those who contribute to reinforcing it. The objects that make up these barriers, the product of mass industrial processes, occupy a priori both public and domestic space. This activates a possibility of recognition in observers: by looking at the common objects capable of giving shape to a barricade, it becomes possible to observe everything around us with different eyes, starting with the furnishings of one’s own home.