ROSA MARTINEZ. You've prepared three projects for the Spanish Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennial: Wall en- closing a space, Covered word and Hooded woman seated facing the wall. Let's begin with the wall, which blocks access to the pavilion interior. How does this “obstruction action” differ from your others? | have in mind the truck blocking the motorway ringing Mexico City, the barricade in the street in Limerick, the human bar- tier in the Metropolitan Museum of Pusan, the P-S.1 brick wall in New York or the corrugated metal enclosure at the Lisson Gallery in London. What does obstruction mean to you? SANTIAGO SIERRA. Obstruction prevents interchange between the positions of elements on either side of it. It can be the physical materialisation of a prohibition, in which case it has a repressive function, or it can prevent a coercive force from entering our territory, which would give it an emancipating function. In the first situation—that of prohibition— only parallel movements can take place on either side of the line of obstruction; that is, only those that accept and re ‘produce the line. But oblique or perpendicular movements always come up against the line of obstruction and cannot {go beyond it, or they might be clamouring for the obstacle to be removed. Each movement is therefore defined by its relation to the obstruction as it is physically or ideologically placed. The second instance of obstruction, which has— a | said—an emancipating function, is similar to a barricade. Here, the flow is unidirectional and its discontinuity can ‘only be subjectively decided in terms of preserving our space. In the traller blocking the ring road in Mexico City, and in the Pusan museum, we have very similar situations because unidirectional traffic was held up or filtered. In Limerick, it was a fictitious barricade set up with official permission, and it had a quasi-metalinguistic function. At the P.S.1, not only did we have a worker confined to one side of the wall for 15 days; we also had thase who were not confined to the other side, stressing the opposition in the relationship on either side. This wall, which was originally imaginary and less prominent, already regulated their relationships. Walls, whether visible or not, set on either side of a social relationship {like blocks of human backs, ships’ holds or closed rooms), are an allusion to vertically arranged impositions, to com- partments of order. The instance that comes closest to what concerns us here was the one in London: a large group from the art scene was trying to gain access to a closed space. Why were they doing this? Ifit was to see an artwork, the piece was smack in front of them and, what's more, if they intended to socialise, they could have done it on that side of the obstruction, in the middle ofthe street. Here, we might well be seeing an obstruction of the second type, as ‘we only perceive one direction in the intended flow of traffic. However, that is not the case because, as with borders, or in the case of our pavilion, we are prevented from gaining access to a hierarchically superior reality RM. How do you choose your materials? Why did you use rubble masonry for this wall? SS. It depends what we want to put across. Bricks are laid one by one and point tellingly to the laboriousness in their making, which has an almost macabre effect if our alm is to accentuate imposed order. (I should add that itis also more expensive than other materials, which is why | use it less than what Ilwould like to.) In London, | wanted to stage a re-take by using galvanized sheet metal that most closely resembled what was used to seal off the access to Ar~ gentinian banks, to set up—for those capable of seeing ita comparison between “frustrations”. (| made the soundpiece, The displacement of a cacerolada, just a few days before that.) In the wall of the Spanish Pavilion, the use of rubble; cheap, coarse brick made of cement, commonly used in temporary farm enclosures or to stop up windows and doors in vacant buildings, is the most suitable material, Ths form of enclosure wil likely last out the duration of the Biennial and wil then have to be removed. It's right for the function, RM. In 1976, the architect Scarpa built a rubble wall to cover the Fascist front of the Italian Pavilion. What are the differences and the parallels between his gesture and yours? $8. | never got to see that wall of Scarpa’s, except in a photo. | know it was a fine, smooth-faced rubble wall, used to create a decent facade covering up the other one but, above all, covering up the word “Italia”. It didn’t look tem- porary, although it was. | suppose they stil didn’t know what to do with their past, and post-modernity pointed the way out. Now we look at the original Fascist facade without being shocked, and it stands to reason: fifty events is a lot of history and, as far as Spain is concerned, too much history. Of course, all the walls enclosing pavilions, whether covered or with changes to the facades or the national emblems are history, and milestones in history, as when the heads were changed on the busts of the Caesars—updating with power, and negating the past. In the case of just ‘Spain, this pavilion has had four facades: one in 1922, one in 1938, the 1952 one and the current one, while it was ‘closed down during two periods—fram 1942 to 1950, and from 1972 to 1978. Almost all national pavilions also closed during the black italian triennial. Enclosing facades or giving them a facelift seems to be a common political stance in this Biennial. | can’t help thinking of references to our long-standing autarky, to our “walled Spain” or to the well- known “walls of my homeland”, just like more specific and more manageable references in the international arena, such as controlling waves of migration, or the idea of a nation, RM. Exactly ten years ago, in 1993, Hans Haacke did an installation about the historico-political symbology in the German Pavilion. Where would you place your project in terms of that referent? SS. In effect, Hans Haacke treated the pavilion as a semantically pre-ordained object, and not as an empty white box for stuffing things into. That stance, like mine, might seem highly deterministic but, on the contrary, it allows for greater versatility. It brings to mind the recent case of my friend and colleague, Javier Tellez, whose work focuses on mental pathologies. When he was invited to work in the Venezuelan Pavilion, the enormous political charge implicit in such involvement led him to turn down the offer. The only possible way out would have been to accept the imposition of the subject matter on his work and talk about the division in the country. This would have entailed renouncing his own discourse. In my case, which is neither better nor worse, the impositions are a stimulus. Working in the United States, Cuba, Switzerland or China does not mean accepting their political conditioning. But the latter would help to shape ‘my work. In my view, Hans Haacke has thrived on tense situations and the national representation of his country goes along way to that. In that respect we have everything in common,RM. Your aesthetic and linguistic referents link up with the syntactic tradition of minimalism, but you subvert industrial seriality and the would-be purity of those—by now—historical works by replacing their limpid ma- terials with coarser ones, or even with people, which are also used as constructive elements and thus objec- tivised. At times, your work connects up with the aesthetics of Art Povera and becomes a denial of the au- tonomy of the art object, because you associate your production with systems of goods recycling and capitalist exploitation. | recall, for example, the action 30 loaves of bread lined up, staged in Fatbol and Ciclista streets in Mexico City in 1996. | take it to be a slap in the face from the Third World for the pretentious works of Carl André. 88. The minimalists borrowed heavily from scientific disciplines in the hope of acceding to the lrrefutability of what has been clearly demonstrated. They adapted their creative methodology to formulating entities lacking any repre- sentative charge, devoid of anecdote, to things real in themselves; something independent of meaning; something essential. But, what they achieved was not the invention of the cube, or of seriality, or spot colours, which were al- ready around elsewhere and in other guises. What they achieved was that they became aloof to everything else, supremely haughty, which no artist could aspire to, by setting immanence above necessity. 'm surprised that the search for the essence of a manufactured object should not have been associated with the merchandise, the prism, with its economy of storage, or the concrete materialisation of a smooth plane with a moment in industry. | am also surprised by my own fascination for the minimalist object. At heart, | am a minimalist with a guilt complex. Seldom have | seen more beautiful works than those of Judd, Le Witt or the first Morris. I subscribe to their maxim of “less is more", and their constructive methods are never far from my own. But I only use it as a toolbox—I'm talking about something else. You mention my affinity for Art Povera: the fact is that | am far more interested in American antiform art, in which minimalism Is engrossed by the physical aspects of the work; by weight, morbidity, the state of matter, size. | doubt very much that antiform sought to overcome minimalism; rather, it seems to be a second phase. | think itis stil a good schoo|, but of masters blinded by arrogance RM. Coming back to the Pavilion project—there is a paradox in blocking the entrance with a wall and always leaving the door open. You have also removed the doors of the bathroom and the storeroom, leaving these rooms open to view. What are you trying to stress? 88. It's a huge, prominent wall which wouldn't be there if we just locked the door. It is something we can take even if only with our eyes; like a second facade which, unlike this one, has no natural, architectural alibi, but an acutely political one. The current facade is a facing over the original neo-Baroque one from 1922 which is still there, behind the current one, in turn a last-moment change to what would have been a Moorish facade. The ever-open door, then, points up the inner wall, as it reminds us that sealing it off would have been sufficient to prevent entry, but that we have amplified the action in an almost boastful manner. I is a rhetorical effect that reinforces the strength of the wall (An example of this is the electronic surveillance system that has recently been installed to cover the Strait of 69Gibraltar) By removing the bathroom and storeroom doors, we are impoverishing what litle is left to see. This is not something we would expect to see in the white bucket, the toilet and everything else, like the control panel or the rickety metal staircases. These things take us elsewhere. But there they were, covered up. RM. At the back of the pavilion, two security guards monitor access to the interior, which is only permitted to Spanish visitors who show documentary proof of their legally belonging to this specific identity class. Like Policemen or soldiers, or any other worker, they are fulfilling mandates or conventions (in this case, artistic ones) that they might not understand or share. When you give your “actors” orders, you adopt the role of Power. How you feel acting this way? $8. It doesn’t matter how | feel; that’s just the way itis. Artis part of the cultural apparatus, which has a coercive function, not an emancipatory one. An artist is a mega-worker who has overcome anonymity and whose products are redolent with surplus value, I's useless to ask what side s/he is on. However, all s/he is asked for in return is an exemplifying attitude, a higher morality capable of distinguishing his/her wares from luxury jewellery, to put it one way. Of course, that morality usually manifests as highly necessary blindness or escapism. If we leave all the ele- ‘ments present in an art object open to view, or heighten them for better viewing, it always begs that question. Sup- pose, for argument’s sake, that an artist exhibiting on the second floor of the Guggenheim has nothing to do with controlling access to the museum, or with the work conditions of its security guards; that there is a gulf between an exhibit in the Tate's permanent collection and the gentleman who sits eight hours a day next to the artwork, ete. That's not the way | see it. Very costly mechanisms of legitimation are involved in artistic creation, and there is no such thing as clean money. RM. In what way is the subject of capitalist exploitation of the worker and the division of society into classes involved in the Pavilion project? $8. On the level of evocation. The accentuation of hierarchies imposed by the wall cannot fall to remind us that the States represented at the Biennial strive to be impervious to the lumpen beyond their borders. You will also see re- mains of the process of dismantling the last exhibition, which I have left intact in order to show the traces of work which are usually wiped out when an art gallery is about to open its doors. These traces, in the form of dirt and marks, is evidence that this space, ike any other, is a place of work RM. Entering the bare space of the Pavilion through the only door available (the back door) is like penetrating into an old, emaciated, maternal womb, full of marks and wounds, and traces of absence. You play with the traces of memory and oblivion; you also play with an aethetics of ruin and abandonment. Which is the expe- rience you want to put across to spectators by their passing through that phantasmatic space? SS. | want them to see the Spanish Pavilion from inside. The image is so potent that any explanation is superfluous,{and you have almost just put it in words. | am not going to touch anything that is already there; | feel that an omis- sion is sometimes much more powerful than an action, as Isidoro Valcarcel Medina put it RM. Apart from the invisible walls of the Biennial itself, the concrete division you have set up turns your vi tors into part of the performance because it places them on either side of the wall. This recalls the invisible wall in Bufiuel’s The Exterminating Angel. 8S. As | mentioned earlier, that is the function of a wall—to organise the movernents of whoever happens to be on either side of it. On one side, Spaniards; but not on the other side, or, at least, not necessarily. Both were already of this nationality, or otherwise; this fact is now emphasized and displayed, to prompt one to think of one’s belonging, The spectator does not obviously belong wholeheartedly, and not because s/he Is expected to take part—as in the times of the optimistic happening—but because his/her chances of access have been segregated along subjective lines. The only way of not becoming part of the piece is to stay out of the pavilion altogether. There are immaterial walls that render innecessary the other, brick, walls, or those of which the bricks are only the visual materialisation, and redundantly so. | have long been concerned with the idea of Bufiuel's Exterminating Angel, a fascinating film which | regard as part of the core of my work. It was an Exterminating Angel that prevented the workers from Guatemala from getting up and out of the boxes, or that held the black forms as coffins against the wall in New York and Zurich, That Exterminating Angel is always the same, and | think | have pinpointed it. RM. In the only action you carry out inside the Pavilion, you use an old woman wearing a hood who remains seated facing the wall for an hour. This work links up directly with the critical, expressionistic tradition of Goya's black paintings and the theme of witches, the Inquisition and punishment. What does it actually mean to carry out this action in the physical and, above all, symbolic context of the Spanish Pavilion? Do you set up con- nections with the idea of the “homeland” as the body that defines law and which, through its protection and punishment, establishes identity? ‘88. The work in the Spanish Pavilion in Venice is not much different from any other place, in the sense that one adapts ‘a moment of one's discourse to a specific location. One of my last pieces, done in London, was Group of persons facing the wall, and Person facing into a comer, a part collaboration with a proselytising Christian organisation. It was incredible because | could talk to those people, recruited by the organisation from among the urban working classes of the city, ina language common to all monotheists. | talked to them about Genesis, about how God, after expelling us from Paradise, formulated our punishment as “you will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow”. Their punish- ‘ment was to remain facing the wall for weeks, in conscious fulfilment of the biblical mandate, They wanted to be saved! That is the work—a kind of punishment by which you sell your time, your body and your will to your master’s vested Interests. The Spanish Pavilion is, in legal terms, Spain, as is the embassy in Rome—consular territory dependent on the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. | was thinking about the same thing as in London, and now, as in Spain and—it couldn't be otherwise—about the Catholic national tradition. But, as | was saying, worming my way out of your spe- cific question—let the piece speak for itself. Forgive me for not wanting to talk about that and other works more than laterally. | hope you will settle for extrapolations. RM, Some of your works broach the subject of punishment. What is your relationship to authority? Do you ex- perience the guilt of infringing norms as a liberation? SS. | don’t infringe any norms. No natural norm, because | don't fly and | don't breathe under water, and, no human one either, as my limits are those of the capitalist system. The guilt complex is our way of communicating with the norm lodged in our own head—it's when it demands our compliance. I's an internalised form of punishment. The law relates to us through the imposition of punishment or work, which comes to the same thing, and that is all there is. between the norm and us. The law is there to be observed and itis fulfilled without any chance of infringement. RM. But a lot of your actions are a shakeup with a clearly cathartic function. You stage the anguish of death and the void, loneliness and loss, and the waste of energy that goes into both economic production and libidinal production, for which you created an extraordinary metaphor with your Spraying of polyurethane over 18 peo- ple in the church of San Mateo in Lucca. Where would you place your sorrow and your feeling of abandonment? 8S. In psychoanalysis, catharsis Is taken to mean the liberation of unconscious affects, and itis curious because | do indeed aspire to the “ideological placement of the political unconscious’, if you will excuse this outlandish ex- pression. | fee! that the moments of tension set up by some works spawn minimal political animals, by which the in- ividuat’s mindset is laid bare. Passions are the medium for this catharsis, which demands great intensity when | dis~ close the facts that constitute the artwork. So | don’t think the term is inappropriate for defining the responses or reactions my work elicits. As for your specific question, | don’t know what to say—I suppose sorrow is part of our re- lationships with our environment and ourselves. It is comparatively acceptable because pain alerts us to the existence of some unsolved problem. In this sense, | admit that my work may seem sad; but that wasn't intended—itis just an- other reaction. The references to masturbation in the Lucca piece and in others are not related to uselessness but to egoism in the production of capital or libido. A return to minimalism would remind us of the essence of the manu- factured object. RM. How do you relate your own social background to the meaning of your work? ‘8S. I'm a white, Caucasian male, which places me on a level of privilege. This is obvious across almost the whole world. To say that men and women are equal, that whites and the rest of the races are the same, or that the opinion of a non-Westemer carries the same weight as ours is the expression of a desire, not a reality. So, when | produce a piece, there's another element | have to include—myself. Whether | lke it or not, my presence conditions the credi- bility and feasibility of a project. This is still true today, when the white male's guilt complex prompts him to play downhis status with an “after you..." to the other. This merely confirms the rule. My presence also has a semantic charge {for many. Once singled out as an author, | am often blamed for a labour situation derived from the setting, and in many places this makes a lot of sense. To give an example, maybe | didn’t create the Mexican caste system, but others like ‘me did and they're still at the top. I'm not scared by this situation because | must be someone, and works are not produced by immaterial beings but by people who have some genetically inherited and socially sanctioned advan- tage or disadvantage. | include all those elements in the piece, without hiding them at all—it’s the only way of deal- ing with situations posed by my background, RM. In this performance in particular, like the one with prostitutes in Havana and the Tzotzil Indians in Zi- nacantén, you have used women. What are the sexual and gender implications in your work? SS. I'm fairly interested in gender. I's only in my pieces relating to the sex business that | specifically targeted men cor women, because it's a highly specialised market. In general, | usually focus on the people that are at the bottom— extreme labour situations admirably account forall the rest. In that respect, women are usually at the bottom; that is why they often appear in my work. When | paid dollars for some Tzotzil Indians to utter a sentence, what | was look- ing for was Tzotzil Indians, regardless oftheir sex, but ones who didn’t know a word of Spanish. The men are the ones that go out to sell their wares or whatever, so they usually speak Spanish to get around, while the women stay on the land or at home where they work, without knowing a word in the external language. That's why I got them to do it. That's precisely what | wanted to talk about, about how language is used to dominate. There, if you don’t speak Span- ish, you can't leave the home or change your role in society. Evidently, it was the women who showed this most. That's what has happened with many works—I didn't ask for women but, when | came close to the lowest rung of the lad der, I came across women. We First-Worlders and, above all, the world of culture, have no idea how grim and deep this issue is. We usually think it has been settled or mitigated RM. The work Covered word is an ephemeral sculpture made of poor, industrial materials (bin bags and mask- ing tape). Being vulnerable to the elements and, possibly, vandalism (which some of your past works have suf- fered, like the project at the Lisson Gallery) means workers at the Pavilion have to restore it. The politics of obedience and labour subjugation are again present here. The ceaseless exercise in destruction and recon- struction is a clear metaphor ofthe futility of human effort and the meaningless of work. What other overtones does this action have for you? 8S. Being of poor fabric, the cover keeps revealing the word, so we need someone there to cover it up. This stresses the act of covering and the circumstances it takes place in, being staged seriall, like the raising of the flag, although the other way around. The covered word is “Spain”, and the whole issue lies there. Covering that word, which every- one knows is there, signalling the property of the Pavilion, is like stressing itor illuminating it. All theses acts warrant reflection on the meaning and function of words, and this is significant in a country like Spain which has a nationalanthem with no oficial lyrics, where a large part of the population identify with a different national flag, ‘or with more or less centrifugal local flags, or other national fantasies and symbols. We can't forget that, in Venice, Ill be representing Spain. We right well conclude that this subject had already been given. It's a way of thinking of Spain, just as covering up that word with a new facade was a way of thinking of Italy. In fact, what we're doing is quite natural inthe history of this biennial and responds to not knowing what to do with so much wordiness. That accounts for the existence of the Aperto, for example, and for the multinational use of the Italian Pavilion. We could also as- ‘sume that the creeper growing on the facade of the Spanish Pavilion is intended to at least play the word down or ‘mute it, f not cover it up. The very word “Spain” was a last-minute addition one afternoon, at consular request, when the facade was having its last refurbishment for the purpose of removing the pre-constitutional eagle, without plan- ning to replace it with anything else. RM. Do you have any particular misgivings, complex or enthusiasm about representing Spain at this Biennial? 88. No. 'm Spanish, and I'm not reneging on that. But, neither do I like pride, whether sexual or national, and, even less so racial pride, as it always implies intimidating whoever does not fit in, or an almost tautological kind of senti- mentalism which involves feeling proud about being what in any case one can’t help being. | think that, the way the Biennial is developing, these issues are being addressed in a more organic, less starchy way. Some years ago it was proposed to include foreign artists resident in the country owning each pavilion and, in many pavilions, ike the Dutch cone, that is almost the norm. Of course, this creates a certain air of World Cup football, but countries now subcon- tract their conscience to renowned curators, and so this effect has been mitigated. RM. Your work mirrors the violence in power relationships. It reproduces the technologies of dominion that Foucault talked about. It highlights the mercantilisation and debasement of bodies and souls. Foucault says that the exercise of power is reserved for elites, and that hurting others confers feelings of superiority. When you put yourself in the place of the dominator, you manage to lay bare its mechanisms of exploitation, but, do you think there is a way out of the dialectics of master and slave? 88. From Barcelona or Helsinki, we might conclude that mankind has evolved favourably from its infirmity. But, all you need to do is take a fight to Manila or Medellin to see the collateral damage of our optimism, When you migrate the other way around, the feeling of being a dominator—as you put it—never leaves your mind, and that's because it's completely true. That's what Francis Alys once said. In my case, I've tried to make that point very clearly, and | would add that we could roundly qualify the inhabitants of developed nations in the same terms, as we could the pockets of First-Worlders besieged by the class struggle in less fortunate countries. To talk of a feeling of superior- ity in the exercise of power is ke saying that white conveys a feeling of whiteness. Granted, the West enjoys; it en- joys immensely. Posing the dialectics of master and slave is escapism in itself. At least, if it is posed in these erro- neous terms.RM. In Pasolini's film Sald, there are three categories of characters: the executioners, subjects with the power to decide and destroy; a kind of “aristocracy of crime”, the civil servants, collaborators and accomplices who convey and execute orders, and the afflicted bodies, subdued and powerless to rebel. His visions now appear to have more currency than ever. Is life not yet life? ‘SS. These categories very often appear intermixed. A world in those terms would be highly vulnerable. Subjugating all human activity to the circulation and reproduction of capital holds out the exploiter-slave model as a perfect way of creating atom-like individuals. It weaves cross-class complicities like structures of national, racial, sexual or what- ever convenient genome the cultural apparatus helps us create. The difficulty in getting rid of an opposite is as big as separating the id from the Freudian superego. In this context, it's not that life is postponed, but that we take part in the mechanisms for administering our own death. In this respect, rather than a driving force of history, the class struggle is a sign of life. RM. The function of art is to represent; that is, to “speak the crime”, but not to carry it out. You turn your ac- tors into symbolic victims. You make them obey orders; you tattoo them, make them remain silent and im- mobilise them, thus reproducing situations of everyday, universal punishment and exploitation. For many spectators these actions are too disturbing and immoral, overstepping the permissible. Do the contractual agreements you draw up allow you to believe that what you are doing is mere representation? Where do you set the borderline between reality and representation? SSS. | don't set limits because they are always established by others, but i's true | don’t know the meaning of the word “representation”. As hard as | try, | can't find any meaning to the word. As for the first part of your question, where you return to the idea of crime and the immoral, Ill attempt to explain. As an artis, | have tried not to confuse reality with desire, Above all, because I'm sure nobody is interested in my desires. If, to give an example, in the old port of ‘SanJuan de Puerto Rico, | see people working extremely long hours, not only to eat but to pay for their doses of heroin, | proceed as follows: | think up a simple gesture as a pretext for triggering a work situation representative of them, and | pay them the way they would like to be paid—with a dose. Paying more than what they expect, or in a way that suits my conscience, is useless, because I'm not talking of my conscience but of them and their Exterminating An- gels. That would suggest I'm a good guy and that | did my bit towards saving those souls. Ridiculous! If I can find ‘someone prepared to hold up a wall for five days for 65 euros, I'd be showing you a true fact. If jouble that, ' bbe showing my generosity. That's what | do and then | make it known. | don't document real I become in- volved in them. | feel uncomfortable with the stance of the omniscient feporter and, although it's not a question of talking about myself, | can't hide behind formulas for the sake of impartiality and detachment. | said earlier that I'm part of the semantic charge of my work. | have to accept that this action, opposed to merely collecting data, makes me look to many like the ultimate cause of unpleasant events. But | can't detach myself from the action and not be- ‘come involved. I've thought about it because nobody likes producing works that makes them look bad publicly, and| feel that the reasons for my differences with the public lie elsewhere. The work done is useless, It is said, and that would be a macabre gloating over exploitation. The question is—who is it useless for? If a worker gets paid for stand- ing stil, or for making screws, itis only important for the person that employs them. And, if someone employs them, its because they stand to gain something from it. This would set spectators in a abyss of meaninglessness, because the proposition is clear: it doesn’t matter what you do if you're paid for it; it doesn’t matter what you force someone 0 do if you get rich on it. A ‘even have the right to be resentful RM. That assertion would fit the framework of the new conservative revolution as it implies that the market (capital) legitimises all types of behaviour. However, for many years you have produced your work totally on the fringes, driven by the need to articulate your ideas rather than to get rich. ! am specifically interested in the intellectual and existential tension that has kept you in the art world. n this respect, I'd like to cite a sem- al and fascinating work in your production Cleaning of @ floor to obtain different distribuitions of water, done in December 1998 in your home on Regina street in Mexico City. In art, isn't there a gratuitous sense of waste, a liberal waste of gesture, a certain pleasure in the unproductive? 88. The new conservative revolution is as old as the emergence of capitalism and modern colonialism during the Re- naissance. What | was saying refers to the moral base of capitalism and its actual savage effects. The conditions | work in do not in any way affect the system as a whole. Neither do they escape from it in any way. | am not an ex- ample of anything, and any attempt at articulating my ideas, if | have them, does not set me outside the rules of the game, neither now nor in the past. A position of marginality within the art world should not be understood as heroic but as highlighting the failure of a certain moment in production, in its intrinsic aspirations to become merchandise, ‘An unpublished book was never written and the way it is publicised entails accepting the norms of the market it will have to move in. The piece on Regina street leaves no quarter for hope in creativity and generosity. It expresses the exact opposite. If we transfix there the solution to economic determinisms, our road along consistency is the addi- tion. The patterns | distractedly drew with the water were intended to liven up the cleaning task, as they drew my at- tention away from the compulsory nature of the action and focused it on constructing a drawing. They were an in: tentional, manifest form of self-deception, like the singing of a builder or the brandy drunk by a worker in his free time,