The Peaceful Reversal
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Project realized in collaboration with Irene de Andrés
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The La inversión pacífica [The Peaceful Reversal] project is shaped from a minimal gesture on an national emblem built and installed by Franco’s institutionality, which finally has been dismantled by the Spanish Law of Historical Memory. An uncomfortable and heavy national emblem that has been stranded for years behind the bars of a basement of the Spanish Academy in Rome. Its singular situation reflects, even today, the Spain’s problematic relationship with its own past.

This piece, which is inventoried under the euphemistic title “Pre-Constitutional emblem”, was made in the 1940s after the National-Catholic victory in the Spanish Civil War. It was part of a massive production commissioned by the dictatorship to provide the State with its new symbols. In this sense, what looked like an emblem carved in stone turned out to be a mass-produced concrete casting.

For some reason, this object was left halfway between the facade where it was installed and the scrapyard, gathering dust next to the boilers. Upon noticing its presence, artists Irene de Andrés and Alán Carrasco decided to highlight this anomaly by proposing this reversal, which returns this symbol to the main floor of the Academy, now denying its own representation.

The next phases of the project consist of the transfer of the piece to Spain and its subsequent donation to the Spanish Academy in Rome, now converted into a contemporary artwork, which will require the fascist emblem to be removed from the official inventory. Thus, we will achieve its total deactivation.