Things will never be the same again. All my enemies are now my friends.
- Sidestepper, 'Walking'

There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments.
- Robert Musil, 'Monuments'¹

Almost 30 years after the death of General Francisco Franco and the end of his dictatorial regime, the last equestrian monument to the Generalísimo (in his hometown, Ferrol, Galicia) was dismantled amid much controversy, not just of the 'need to remember or need to forget' debate, but also of the few but outspoken remaining fascist supporters. The official project of forgetting has been a long and slow process in Spain, beginning almost immediately after the death of the dictator in 1975 with the streets being re-baptised with their former names, monuments destroyed and the fascist 'aesthetic' being eliminated from acceptable contemporaneous architecture and design practice. But, of course, there is no straightforward return to democracy from dictatorship, and despite the ongoing project of erasure, there is no easy way to bury the past.

*

On the coastline of the Basque Country, about 15km from Bilbao, sits the finished but never-active nuclear power plant, Lemoniz. In the late 1970s, during the historical period of transition from dictatorship to democracy, the site provoked a massive oppositional mobilisation of the general populace that took the form of strikes and protest demonstrations, many of which were met with police violence. In keeping with an ideological position in which ecology figured dominantly, ETA's military branch launched a series of terrorist attacks, killing Lemoniz workers and losing several militants. The kidnapping and execution on 6 February 1981 of the plant's chief engineer provoked the suspension of activities - and the first-ever general strike against ETA. The nuclear plant was never opened and its menacing historical presence faded in time, but the site remains - an enormous concrete atrocity on the coast - with a moratorium quietly thickening around it over the years. But this forgetting of historical events is a complicated business. On the one hand, the inoperative plant not only houses the community's memory of the violence at Lemoniz, it also embodies major dystopian aspects of modernism: the political discontent and economic disaster generated by this major technological initiative and the permanent destruction of a natural site and its ecological balance in the name of technology. This is difficult to square with the Basque imaginary around modernity that had attempted to harmonise the notion of linear progress (the Basque region as one of the main focuses of the industrial revolution in Spain) with the Basque nationalist project of a mythical return to originary or primitive roots. On the other hand, the fact that the political mobilisation of the populace and ETA stopped the nuclear project from going ahead and implemented (albeit through violent means) their discursive positions regarding ecology and political ideology complements the nationalist fervour of the Basque Country. So what are we left with at Lemoniz? The obsolete power station essentially operates somewhere between a ruin and a monument to both failed modernism and successful radical politics.

[...] it is not a matter of claiming that 'History' is only made up of stories
that we tell ourselves, but simply that the 'logic of stories' and the
ability to act as historical agents go together. Politics and art, like forms
of knowledge, construct 'fictions', that is to say material rearrangements
of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said,
between what is done and what can be done.
- Jacques Rancière²

Within the relatively stable political climate in the year 2000, the artist Ibon Aranberri, in collaboration with art-production office consonni, attempted to reopen the political sphere in the context of Lemoniz. He proposed to stage a fireworks display at the site of the power plant. The apparently benign act of bringing into materiality (by the ephemeral means of fireworks) a celebratory manifestation of the explosive potential of the nuclear plant performs the function of both recoding and making visible to itself the historically and politically half-buried 'story' of the site. Moving beyond the modernist paradigms for the writing of history, Aranberri brings to light 'the distinction - or the indistinction - between the modes of intelligibility specific to the construction of stories and the modes of intelligibility used for understanding historical phenomena'.³ Without rewriting the 'story' itself, Aranberri effects a simple horizontal shift in the manner of storytelling by proposing an absurd rupture (a celebration at the contentious site) in the established (even if buried) historicity of the place. Aranberri's intervention is not operating along activist artistic lines, and he himself does not adopt a clear political position regarding specific historical events. Instead, he actively politicises the writing (and re-writing) of history. His proposed action at Lemoniz simply suggests politics, and this functions as a powerful political operation in itself. Dependant on the unspecific ideological terms of the artist's intervention, the work operates as an assault on the hegemonic, institutionalised political sphere itself, undermining the established discourse by simply relying on the fact that there is no point of access for his gesture to enter that realm, and, importantly, by not demanding entry.

The fireworks project was turned down by Lemoniz authorities, and exists only in proposal form (and as a slide projection).

*

In much of Ibon Aranberri's work the artist attempts to coax into action the parallel states of memory and forgetting. He mines particular moments of late modernism or early post-Franco democracy, using as his material historical events, such as the case of Lemoniz, and existing artworks familiar to the general public. Through the objects he produces, he makes manifest the relationship of cultural history to that of modernism, dislodging the constructed logic of fiction and fact in the act of the writing of histories, always generating some confusion around the fixity of particular collective or state-driven ideological positions.

The aesthetic regime of the arts does not contrast the old with the new. It
contrasts, more profoundly, two regimes of historicity. [...] In the aesthetic
regime of art, the future of art, its separation from the present of
non-art, incessantly restages the past.
- Jacques Rancière⁴

One cannot say that we don't notice them; one would have to say they un-notice
us, they withdraw themselves from our senses. [...] Well, doubtless this can be
explained. Everything permanent loses its ability to impress. Everything that
forms the walls of our lives, so to speak the stage set of our consciousness,
loses the ability to play a role in this consciousness.
- Robert Musil⁵

Hanging directly behind the main podium in the assembly hall of the Basque Parliament is a sculpture by the Basque artist Nèstor Basterretxea (born 1924). Since 1984 every parliamentary debate has occurred with this abstract sculptural object as its backdrop. Likewise, every media representation of parliamentary debate since 1984 has this symbol integrated into the image, and it is from one of these newspaper photographs that Aranberri reproduced the object, hollowed out and equipped with an accessible dial to an AM/FM radio transmitter and loudspeakers that he installed inside the piece - titled Gaur Egun (This is CNN) (Today (This is CNN), 2002).In an earlier piece titled Horizontes (Horizons, 2001), Aranberri went back to the work of the late-modernist Basque artist Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) and produced a series of posters, each measuring 70cm by 50cm, which repeat a slightly manipulated version of the commonly identifiable graphic designs made by Chillida. The images on the banners are based on material that ranges from the symbol for anti-nuclear power-plant development to the University of the Basque Country logo, and includes a graphic reproduction of Chillida's sculpture El Peine de los Vientos (The Wind Comb, 1976), located on the bay of San Sebasti&aagrave;n. The posters are printed in black and white and are hung like festive banners from the ceiling.

Another case of the artist's explicit use of modernist works comes with his borrowing of modernist architecture - which, historically, has lent itself to discussion around the social determination of space and collective social experience more
easily than the modernist sculptures that Aranberri refers to. In the international context of Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt in 2002, with G-Pavilion the artist returns to two important international modernist icons: Picasso's Guernica and the Bauhaus style of Mies van der Rohe. (Mies van der Rohe had used a print of Guernica to decorate the sketches of his models.) He builds and inserts these two elements into a pedestrian context: a graphically simplified reproduction of Guernica decorates a Mies van der Rohe-style pavilion in a residential area of Frankfurt.

The banner flutters in his hand, but there is no wind. His sword is drawn, but
no one is afraid of it. His arm points commandingly forward, but no one thinks
of following him. Even the horse which has risen to jump with flaring
nostrils remains on his hind hooves, transfixed with astonishment that the
people below calmly stick a sausage in their mouths or buy a paper instead of
stepping to the side.
- Robert Musil⁶

In the three examples of work described above, good/bad art-historical aesthetic judgement doesn't affect the artist's choice of material to work on. The latemodernist and post-Franco artworks-cum-symbols that Aranberri selects are those emptied out by over-exposure and the simple passage of time, unhinged from their intended signification. Aranberri acts on objects whose symbolic value has shifted historically from the frontline in the terrain of art, politics or architecture, passing through a period of something akin to pure decorative or design-value, and later attaining a semi-monument/semi-ruin status, finding themselves dozing happily around the very outer edges of collective social consciousness. The artist actively jumpstarts these now-decaying monuments in order to get them back into a flow of history. This operation requires an act, both on the part of the artist and the audience he invites to participate with and in the piece. With the originals still existing today, Aranberri positions his almost doubles into their contemporary political, social and cultural frame. Simultaneously, by remote control, he reactivates the referents and brings them back into consciousness, neither in a celebratory nor in a critical way, but as a means of warping temporal distances and creating parallel stories that blur the linear temporal forms of historicity. What do these modernist works have to say or do in contemporary society? Though no longer disruptively present in either political or cultural territories, these objects have been embedded into public consciousness over time. Through the displacement of the ideological functions of these works and symbols, Aranberri's unsanctioned commemorations signal a rejection of the writing of official histories, especially those in which forgetting plays a major role.

The idea of modernity is a questionable notion that tries to make clear-cut
distinctions in the complex configuration of the aesthetic regime of the arts.
It tries to retain the forms of rupture, the iconoclastic gestures, etc., by
separating them from the context that allows for their existence: history,
interpretation, patrimony, the museum, the pervasiveness of reproduction...
The idea of modernity would like there to be only one meaning and direction
in history, whereas the temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the
arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities.
- Jacques Rancière⁷

*

GR 34 Donostia - Arantzazu
The GR 34 goes on by ancestral routes (11th century) that crosses Guipúzcoa
from north to south. This path was once used for seasonal cattle migration.
In Arantzazu, there is a mixture of mountain and peregrinal mysticism that
surrounds the visitor. It is about 75 km long. The most significative points
are: Donostia, Usurbil, Ormaztegui, Zerain and Arantzazu (GR 35, GR 21 and
GR 65-2).⁸

Nearby the Sanctuary of Arantzazu - rebuilt during the late-Franco period and the third of the pilgrimage sites listed along the Route of the Three Temples - Ibon Aranberri intervened in the mountainscape with his piece (Ir.T. no.513) Cave (2003). The project consists of the installation of a metal structure over the mouth of the Iritegi cave - with a circular opening near the top to allow for the circulation of the bats who dwell in the cave, and a door with lock and key at the base - and a group excursion to the site. In the artist's book No Trees Damaged, it is presented in strictly scientific terms: analyses of the two species of endangered bats that dwell in the cave, maps, diagrams and photographs of the site.⁹ In his description of the project, Aranberri makes no mention of the proximity of the Sanctuary nor of its function in the late-Franco period as a site of 'contemporaneity', built as it was by Sáenz de Oiza in collaboration with the major Basque artists of the period: Chillida (sculptures), Basterretxea (murals), Oteiza (sculptures), Lucio Muñoz (paintings). Aranberri prefers to refer to the project as one that has to do with graphically transferring the process of mapping and scientific research onto the mountainside. Interestingly, this more scientific methodology follows the strong archaeological, ecological and biological presence in this mountain range.

That is what I point out when I talk about applying 'the same graphic effect to a life-size setting and measure its effect on society'. I mean that it felt important to respond to the mental impulse of looking for a cover, an instinctive form of erasing what appears as discontinuous. For example, crossing out with a black marker a spelling mistake or a hole. I'm interested in this formal alteration, its psychological effects on people's mentality, specially within the closest community. Maybe this is a way to examine the relation of the sacred to a consciousness of a weakened modernity.¹⁰

We are brought back, in many ways, to the political elements present in the Lemoniz situation: the originary myth that in Cave goes hand in hand with the archaeological finds at the site and the romantic imaginary of the mountain as symbol of 'Basqueness'; the caves as shelters for radical endangered politics, as hideouts for both protected species of bats and ETA (this piece was developed by Aranberri in 2003, in the era of the 'war on terrorism', post-WTC, when the terrorist strategies of violence such as the one practiced by ETA had become generally unacceptable as a viable political strategy); and the industrial revolution and failure of modernity (the ill-fitting metal structure over the mouth of the cave acts as a blocking-off of the 'discontinuity' as Aranberri calls it, but leaving obvious traces of the attempts at erasure).

Instead of trying to extricate himself as an artist from under the weight of the tradition of the Basque-modernist artists of the 20th century and the political territory of heady nationalism with its accompanying history of originary myths, pride and violence - or, one might even venture to say, of history itself as written in modernist terms - Aranberri revisits and reworks the 'logic of stories' to unhinge the practice of historicity and even of politics itself as we know it, ensconced in its standard iconic forms of signification. Ranciëre describes the concerns that he is answering to in The Politics of Aesthetics in terms that I would borrow to describe Aranberri's general project: 'aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity.'¹¹ Essentially, in Aranberri's practice, the world of aesthetics functions not in parallel to, but as intimately tangled up with the world and the political subject, and thus it is not isolated in the realm of art that the artist's aesthetic 'acts' provide the basis for rethinking the stories we've been told to believe.

- Pip Day