In 2005, the Paris-based artist Alejandra Riera and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona published the book Maquetas-sin-cualidad (Models-without-quality).¹ The book appeared after the exhibition 'maquettes-sans-qualité, travail en grève/treball en vaga/work on strike', which took place at the Fundació Tàpies that same year and displayed extensive parts of Riera's long-term project 'Un problème non résolu, <1995-…>' ('An Unresolved Problem, <1995-…>'). Initiated in 1995, this project can be characterised as a co-operative, experimental- research initiative that investigates the conditions for and possibilities of political action in diverse social contexts. During the project, the participants use and produce documents that relate to political situations of everyday life as well as to specific moments of political activism - for example, the Kurdish struggle in Turkey or the campaign of the sans papiers for legal documentation in France.

This large-scale, wide-ranging project is subdivided into intermediate stages, which mark new directions of investigation and working constellations. Riera refers to them as maquettes-sans-qualité, or maquetas-sincualidad. Each of them is numbered and accompanied by subtitles that indicate the starting date, the current status of work and details on the content.² And each assembles various documents from the project, such as photographs, captions, texts and video documentations. The maquetas can be considered an archive of the project's activities - but an archive which refuses any defined or logical structure. Instead, the documents appear in 'discontinuous arrangements'. Riera herself describes the maquetas as 'the form that has been given to an imaginary space, a refuge that leaves room for the multiple voices brought into play by the corpus of an unfinished work of artistic practices'.³ With these words she underlines not only the