WHILE BOMBS ARE DROPPING
Ferran Barenblit
Drawing upon Cristina Lucas’s work Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing), Ferran Barenblit gives a historical account of aerial warfare while probing the limits and possibilities of its visual representation by artists.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning, 2015-ongoing. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
[War]
The aged in the villages
Ownerless heart.
Love with no object
Grass, dust and crow.
And youth?
In the coffin
From Unending lightning, 1936 (fragment)
Miguel Hernández1
The most relevant work of Spanish 20th century art, and possibly one of the most recognised all over the world, depicts the horror and death resulting from an aerial bombing.
On 26 April 1937, the town of Gernika (as it is written in Basque) endured one of the most infamous episodes of the Spanish Civil War. Germany’s Condor Legion and Italy’s Aviazione Legionaria, both fighting on the side of the pro-Franco insurgents, carried out a sinister military operation with a degree of force that was entirely disproportionate to the strategic importance of the target. Thirty-one bombers—mainly Junkers Ju 52, emblem of the Nazi air industry—supported by twenty-six fighters offloaded a combination of explosive and incendiary bombs and strafed the civilian population for three endless hours. It was not the first aerial bombing of the Spanish Civil War, far from it: just hours after the military uprising of July 1936, Republican planes improvised an attack on the pro-Franco insurgents’ barracks in North Africa. The airmen’s lack of skill meant that some of the bombs also fell on a nearby mosque and its surroundings, inflicting numerous casualties. As for the bombing of Gernika, many details about it are likely to remain unanswered forever, from what motived the attack and who gave the order, to the true number of victims, now tallied at under three hundred. Over time, this air raid has crystallised into a hard myth, a tableau of Fascist cruelty and the heinousness of war.
In January of that year, Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish government to produce a large canvas for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Expo that was due to open in the summer. Designed by Josep Lluís Sert and Luís Lacasa Navarro, the pavilion also included works by Joan Miró and Alberto Sánchez, among many others (all men, incidentally) and proved to be one of the Republic’s most effective propaganda tools. By now Picasso had been living in France for some years, and his initial indifference towards the Republic had warmed somewhat thanks to the insistence of certain intellectuals in government circles, such as Josep Renau, who felt that Picasso’s already great prestige would be advantageous abroad. Although time was short, four months into the commission, the artist had barely advanced beyond the initial sketches. The news from the Basque Country, however, changed everything and galvanised the artist into completing the work. On 12 July, well behind the Expo’s official opening date, the canvas, measuring 7.75 x 3.5 metres, was finally unveiled alongside the rest of the pavilion’s exhibits. The details of the Guernica commission and its subsequent trajectory have all been meticulously recorded, making it possibly one of the best-documented works in history.
What is it that makes Guernica one of the most relevant works of the 20th century, a symbol of the infinite suffering inflicted by all wars? Were it not for its eloquence and place in history, it is safe to say it would not stand out from other works of art. The fact that it is practically the only ‘political’ work produced by an artist whose subject matters were otherwise conventional—landscapes, still lifes, portraits, bullfighting and some abstraction—makes it a rarity. Perhaps it is its size, its impressive visual language, its compositional open-endedness which allows for multiple readings; its status as bearer of the Republican legacy; its eventful subsequent history; its epic transfer to Spain seen by many as the culminating point of the Spanish transition to democracy… Perhaps it is also the absence of explicit references: the work exudes suffering but does not make clear where or with whom the suffering lies. Local is global; the specific, universal. Whatever it is, there it hangs, in the Reina Sofía Museum, forever drawing in devoted crowds all jostling for a glimpse of the work.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Aerial bombardment might be considered one of the cruellest forms of warfare were it not for the fact that heinousness, having no bounds, has seen military technology devise multiple ways of inflicting suffering and destruction. The ease and indiscriminateness with which most air raids are carried out; the fact that unarmed civilian populations are often the target; and the distance between the attacker and the attacked—likely to subdue any qualms or feelings of compassion in the attacker—all combine to make air bombing a particularly abhorrent outcome of progress. Its advent changed the course of military strategy massively: the soldier who had gone to the front to defend his country and the ‘frail’ (his elders, children, mother, sisters…) now saw them being massacred in his own quest to defeat enemy territory. Perhaps originally the air raid had been intended to discourage those on the ground: if all around lay fellow countrymen and women, what was the point of fighting anymore? At any rate, highlighting such sinister logic has not helped to stop the bloodbath. Air raids are generally unexpected, and victims have almost nowhere to escape to, other than into underground shelters that may not guarantee protection. They are sudden, erratic, over in a flash, and mercilessly fatal. Collateral damage is substantial, even though armies have boasted about having supposedly precise munition ever since the first Gulf War. And the destruction they leave in their wake and the corollary effects (remember Agent Orange in the Vietnam War) only magnify the pain and tragedy.
Aircraft had been incorporated into armies fairly early on. By 1910, just six years after the Wright brothers carried out their first flight, reconnaissance flights were already common practice, intended to obtain information that would give the infantry or artillery an advantage over the enemy. It was during one such air patrol, during the Libyan campaign launched a few months later, that the Italian army dropped the first explosives on enemy lines. It was a spontaneous strike and caused indiscriminate damage. Its perpetrator, a lieutenant, was reprimanded by his fellow soldiers, who called him a coward. Indeed, they were not wrong: air raids are the vilest form of attack. The ignoble merit of being the first European Mediterranean nation to execute a planned air strike goes to Spain, when on 5 November 1913, its air force dropped 10-kilogram bombs on the strongholds of Rif, in North Africa. The latest air strike, I learn from CNN as I write these lines in February 2021, has just taken place a few hours ago, in Syria. In between these dates, thousands of strikes have been carried out which have produced millions of civilian victims. If anyone thinks that the word ‘millions’ here is an exaggeration, they should know that during the Second World War Berlin endured almost four hundred bomb attacks in which some 70,000 tonnes of explosives rained down on the city; and that in Japan, 200,000 people perished in just three days in August 1945. So many attacks and so many victims that no one—ever!—has thought to catalogue and bring to light.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Cristina Lucas corrects this deficit in Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing). The piece, though projected, is not a video as such, but a computer program displaying information on three screens. There is no tape, but instead a succession of data and images. The central screen shows a map of the world on which the names of cities targeted in aerial bombings appear and accumulate. Marks left by air raids are like scars that last forever. The size of each name tag is proportional to the number of casualties inflicted. The way the names move on the screen recalls the drop of the bombs. The screen on the left amplifies the data. Basic information appears in quick succession: name of the conflict, air force responsible, name of the bombed city and number of civilian casualties. Military casualties are not included. The screen on the right shows photographs of the strike, taken by journalists who risked their lives to get them or even by the fighters involved; and, more recently, by the victims themselves who, because of the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras and instant dissemination through social media, have become reporters of their own plight. Not all the photographs are of the victims. We see the technology used, a plane in full flight, preparations on the ground… And as the decades pass, they go from black and white to colour, to the views afforded by modern sophisticated satellite and infrared imaging technologies. Unending Lightning is getting longer and longer, as new data and new images of air strikes continue to emerge and are added to this mammoth, unending investigation.
There is no sound; only a silence that allows you to relive the blast of every explosion. Often, the artist chooses to accompany this piece with another, called Piper Prometeo (2013), which is a video of a small plane flying over an urban landscape trailing a banner with L=(1/2)dv2sCL written on it (this is the ‘lift formula’ that explains how airplanes are able to fly). Here, only the drone of the engine can be heard
IF PICASSO’S WORK IS THE RESULT OF SOMETHING USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH “GENIUS”, CREATED IN THE SOLITUDE OF A PARISIAN ATTIC, UNENDING LIGHTNING IS THE RESULT OF EFFORT. IT AIMS NOT TO FIND THE UNIVERSAL IN THE SPECIFIC, BUT RATHER TO COVER EVERYTHING.
If Picasso’s work is the result of something usually associated with “genius”, created in the solitude of a Parisian attic, Unending Lightning is the result of effort. It aims not to find the universal in the specific, but rather to cover everything. Hours and hours of work undertaken by a fairly sizeable team were necessary to produce the account in a way that had not been done before. Data had to be collected from across multiple sources, from history books to military archives and eyewitness accounts printed in the international press of the day. The focus was aerial bombardments, that is, explosives launched from manned devices that were heavier than air and had killed civilians. It did not include the destruction caused by artillery or self-propelled projectiles such as missiles. The result is a narrative that would seem entirely dispassionate were it not for the accompanying images, which stir our consciences and turn the military’s indifference towards the dead—an indifference that revictimizes them again and again—into the protagonist of story.
With Guernica, we give a European conflict universal significance, as we are wont to do after centuries of Eurocentric chronicling. Unending Lightning is universal at its core for it registers all the bombings that have ever taken place in the world. An attack in Kabul is no less relevant than one in New York, and an attack in Gaza is no less relevant than one in Berlin. Any gradation is in relation to the number of victims. In fact, not only is this piece un-Eurocentric; it shifts the angle on colonization and its consequences. The lines that appear linking each bomb site mirror fairly closely those established by Modern colonialism shaping the world today and which are at the root of so many armed conflicts.
Cristina Lucas, La Liberté Raisonnée, 2009. Video still. Video HD 4:3, 4’50’’. Courtesy of the artist
This piece posits a series of questions that permeate Cristina Lucas’s work generally. Like most of her pieces, it is the result of a performative act, which not only says but does. Indeed, the idea of an action infuses almost every aspect of this work; it is present from the onset. The action common to all its manifestations is the air raid, which is chosen carefully. Only complex manoeuvres that have required meticulous forethought and execution are included. The performativity centres on the human body (it counts the number of corpses, that is, the number of lifeless bodies); and although the viewer is not aware of it, the piece is being done continuously, since a software program reveals and reinterprets data each time the work is activated.
Historical revisionism is another facet of Cristina Lucas’s work. She queries the status quo, hegemonic stories which more often than not have been written by driven, white, European men, who through their appropriation of historiography have conditioned the running of all the mechanisms of power. In La Liberté Raisoneé (2009), she draws inspiration from the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix that speaks of this uncomfortable virtue for which we are compelled to fight. Cristina Lucas asks what would happen if a half-naked woman hoisted a flag in the middle of a battle? Something awful, no doubt. She would probably be raped, beaten, killed. This is what happens in the video. Very slowly, we see the main characters in the painting—all men—capture and attack Liberty. The Enlightenment, which purportedly dispelled darkness and decreed the empire of reason, left women out. Worse still: it subdued them even more, as her piece, Rousseau y Sophie (2007), sets out to prove. In it, she reminds us of how Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contribution to education focused exclusively on male children.2 The book to which the piece alludes accompanies Emile as he grows through life; Sophie, on the other hand, only needs to be educated to be his wife. In Touch and Go (2010) it is the subjugated who are given the chance to write the story. The video shows former Merseyside factory workers who fell victim to Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal greed, now aged and well dressed. One by one, they go back to their former workplaces and throw stones at the few remaining windowpanes still in place in the buildings from which they were driven out, as production was dismantled and relocated to working class areas where oppression was as rife as it was in 19th century Britain.
Cartography—that crude expression of power that divides up land in such a cut and dried and mostly arbitrary way—also features in other pieces, many of which are organised chronologically too. Almost always they are unfinished processes, pieces that will never be completed because (and in this sense they are performative too) they look to both the past and the future of humanity. Pantone -500 +2007 (2007) is a chromatic exercise that gives visibility only to territories shaped by the Western notion of ‘state’, and, therefore, by the division of society into the powerful and the subjugated. A marker tracks the march of time—one second for each year. The changes are only colours that appear and disappear, obeying a logic based on the code devised by the New Jersey-based company some decades ago. Not everything that each change represents is revealed: wars, revolutions and death, many deaths. This cartographical investigation continued with Light Years (2009), in the form of a lightbox in a totally dark exhibition room. Here, there is no screen receiving the light of a projector; rather, it is the work that lights up the room. The marker starts at 1789 and again goes up to the present day. One by one, it indicates the countries where the right to vote has been won, applying a different code in each case: from exclusively male voting reserved only to one sector of society (generally, the white population) to universal suffrage for all those of legal age. An achievement of humanity or a worldwide imposition of European political thought? The piece leaves that tension unresolved; but it celebrates the political visibility of the citizen and leaves in the dark those states that have silenced their citizens for too long. Cartography features again in Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino (2010). Two large globes of the earth each bear the names that genitalia are popularly given in countries around the world. Again, it is the people that draw the map of the world. Every country has its own slang for penis and vulva—two words which are said much more than they are written, and which mark out a geography of the coarse or the untoward.
Cristina Lucas, Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino, 2010. Courtesy of the artist
Possibly the most relevant thing about Unending Lightning is the discussion it elicits around the meaning of work in art and the notion of efficiency. The piece defies the patience of any spectator. The writer of these lines naively decided to view it in its entirety when it was showcased in Madrid in 2017, unaware of how much time it would take. Such an assumption can be applied to the notion of research: What does it mean to research in art? What kind of knowledge can be gained? And how should rigorous information dovetail with viewer experience?
We know that art is one of the most effective ways of learning about history. Most of us in the West learn about Trajan’s victory, the Death of Marat and the July Revolution in high school by looking at artistic depictions of these scenes. But how can we explore something as vast as the history of the last century through a single work of art? Unending Lightning suggests a way while at the same time outlining a role for the artist, for here, we are not merely contemplating an image, but being rigorous. We do not expect an explanation, interpretation or voice, but a story based on verified facts. In the 1990s we started to witness what has become known as the ‘forensic turn’, that is, the increased relevance of the study of material evidence as a way of resisting that old maxim that says that not only is history written by the victors, but that any resistance to the abuse of power and destruction can only result in greater injustice. Eyal Weizman, who applied this maxim to architecture, said that it is possible to understand “the materiality and texture of a building as a surface upon which events get imprinted and upon which process becomes form.”3 In its over fifteen years of activity, the collective he leads—Forensic Architecture—has examined many conflicts and dissected certain specific events in order to identify the attackers of the defenceless and the violators of human rights. Victims are thus given a voice and, more importantly, perpetrators can be brought to trial and convicted thanks to evidence provided by artists. This constitutes a major turning point: the artist is no longer telling a story, but actively contributing elements to its judgment. Cristina Lucas goes a step further: departing from ‘the forensic’, she moves the debate from ostracism into the light, from oblivion to the forum in the etymological sense of the term. She builds on this logic, availing herself of a reversal mechanism that multiplies its meaning. If the forensic strategy means slowing down the succession of events and intensifying sensitivity to space, time and images, Cristina Lucas achieves this by speeding up time and systematizing the study of vast sets of data. In other words, if Weizman spends hours studying what happened in an instant (when a projectile exploded, for example), Lucas spends hours studying what happened in an entire century (when millions of projectiles were fired). It is not just a question of eliciting justice, but also of generating new dynamics of collective mourning, of reuniting the living (and, by extension, those yet to be born) with the dead, and of enabling societies to overcome conflict and reconcile themselves with the pain they have endured.
— Translated from Spanish by Stéphanie Jennings
Ferran Barenblit, Director, MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Ferran Barenblit (b. 1968, Buenos Aires) is a museum director with extensive curatorial experience. Since 2015 he has been the Director of MACBA, where he leads the strategic plan that has taken the organization to a new era, expanded its exhibition spaces and created ambitious intellectual, academic, artistic and audience development initiatives.
Barenblit’s fields of research include: rethinking contemporary institutions under the notion of the “constituent museum”; contemporary art history, with a focus on the 1990s; the role of irony in culture; museum programming strategies; the relationship between art and popular culture – including music and the punk movement. He has a deep interest in generating an intense dialogue among the European countries, and with his native Latin America. He has generated many projects that have travelled from Barcelona/Madrid to Mexico City (MUAC – University Museum Contemporary Art) and Buenos Aires (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Fundación Proa).
His previous institutional experience includes CA2M, Madrid (Director, 2008-2015), CASM, Barcelona (Director, 2002-2008), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (Curator, 1996-2001), and The New Museum, New York (Curatorial Assistant, 1994-1996).
Cristina Lucas, Artist
Cristina Lucas is an artist who lives and works in Madrid. Her work has been included in solo shows, such as “Trading Transcendence” at MUDAM, Luxembourg; “Tod Bringendes Licht” at Kunstraum Innsbruck; “Light Years” at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Móstoles; as well as in group shows, festivals, and biennials, such as Yokohama Triennial, 12 Shanghai Biennale, Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Liverpool Biennial, X Bienal de La Habana, 28 Bienal de Sao Paolo, 10 Istanbul Biennal, among many others.
1 Edwin Honig (ed. and trans.), The Unending Lightning: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990), 15.
2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, 1762
3 Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017)
WHILE BOMBS ARE DROPPING
Ferran Barenblit
Drawing upon Cristina Lucas’s work Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing), Ferran Barenblit gives a historical account of aerial warfare while probing the limits and possibilities of its visual representation by artists.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning, 2015-ongoing. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
[War]
The aged in the villages
Ownerless heart.
Love with no object
Grass, dust and crow.
And youth?
In the coffin
From Unending lightning, 1936 (fragment)
Miguel Hernández1
The most relevant work of Spanish 20th century art, and possibly one of the most recognised all over the world, depicts the horror and death resulting from an aerial bombing.
On 26 April 1937, the town of Gernika (as it is written in Basque) endured one of the most infamous episodes of the Spanish Civil War. Germany’s Condor Legion and Italy’s Aviazione Legionaria, both fighting on the side of the pro-Franco insurgents, carried out a sinister military operation with a degree of force that was entirely disproportionate to the strategic importance of the target. Thirty-one bombers—mainly Junkers Ju 52, emblem of the Nazi air industry—supported by twenty-six fighters offloaded a combination of explosive and incendiary bombs and strafed the civilian population for three endless hours. It was not the first aerial bombing of the Spanish Civil War, far from it: just hours after the military uprising of July 1936, Republican planes improvised an attack on the pro-Franco insurgents’ barracks in North Africa. The airmen’s lack of skill meant that some of the bombs also fell on a nearby mosque and its surroundings, inflicting numerous casualties. As for the bombing of Gernika, many details about it are likely to remain unanswered forever, from what motived the attack and who gave the order, to the true number of victims, now tallied at under three hundred. Over time, this air raid has crystallised into a hard myth, a tableau of Fascist cruelty and the heinousness of war.
In January of that year, Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish government to produce a large canvas for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Expo that was due to open in the summer. Designed by Josep Lluís Sert and Luís Lacasa Navarro, the pavilion also included works by Joan Miró and Alberto Sánchez, among many others (all men, incidentally) and proved to be one of the Republic’s most effective propaganda tools. By now Picasso had been living in France for some years, and his initial indifference towards the Republic had warmed somewhat thanks to the insistence of certain intellectuals in government circles, such as Josep Renau, who felt that Picasso’s already great prestige would be advantageous abroad. Although time was short, four months into the commission, the artist had barely advanced beyond the initial sketches. The news from the Basque Country, however, changed everything and galvanised the artist into completing the work. On 12 July, well behind the Expo’s official opening date, the canvas, measuring 7.75 x 3.5 metres, was finally unveiled alongside the rest of the pavilion’s exhibits. The details of the Guernica commission and its subsequent trajectory have all been meticulously recorded, making it possibly one of the best-documented works in history.
What is it that makes Guernica one of the most relevant works of the 20th century, a symbol of the infinite suffering inflicted by all wars? Were it not for its eloquence and place in history, it is safe to say it would not stand out from other works of art. The fact that it is practically the only ‘political’ work produced by an artist whose subject matters were otherwise conventional—landscapes, still lifes, portraits, bullfighting and some abstraction—makes it a rarity. Perhaps it is its size, its impressive visual language, its compositional open-endedness which allows for multiple readings; its status as bearer of the Republican legacy; its eventful subsequent history; its epic transfer to Spain seen by many as the culminating point of the Spanish transition to democracy… Perhaps it is also the absence of explicit references: the work exudes suffering but does not make clear where or with whom the suffering lies. Local is global; the specific, universal. Whatever it is, there it hangs, in the Reina Sofía Museum, forever drawing in devoted crowds all jostling for a glimpse of the work.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Aerial bombardment might be considered one of the cruellest forms of warfare were it not for the fact that heinousness, having no bounds, has seen military technology devise multiple ways of inflicting suffering and destruction. The ease and indiscriminateness with which most air raids are carried out; the fact that unarmed civilian populations are often the target; and the distance between the attacker and the attacked—likely to subdue any qualms or feelings of compassion in the attacker—all combine to make air bombing a particularly abhorrent outcome of progress. Its advent changed the course of military strategy massively: the soldier who had gone to the front to defend his country and the ‘frail’ (his elders, children, mother, sisters…) now saw them being massacred in his own quest to defeat enemy territory. Perhaps originally the air raid had been intended to discourage those on the ground: if all around lay fellow countrymen and women, what was the point of fighting anymore? At any rate, highlighting such sinister logic has not helped to stop the bloodbath. Air raids are generally unexpected, and victims have almost nowhere to escape to, other than into underground shelters that may not guarantee protection. They are sudden, erratic, over in a flash, and mercilessly fatal. Collateral damage is substantial, even though armies have boasted about having supposedly precise munition ever since the first Gulf War. And the destruction they leave in their wake and the corollary effects (remember Agent Orange in the Vietnam War) only magnify the pain and tragedy.
Aircraft had been incorporated into armies fairly early on. By 1910, just six years after the Wright brothers carried out their first flight, reconnaissance flights were already common practice, intended to obtain information that would give the infantry or artillery an advantage over the enemy. It was during one such air patrol, during the Libyan campaign launched a few months later, that the Italian army dropped the first explosives on enemy lines. It was a spontaneous strike and caused indiscriminate damage. Its perpetrator, a lieutenant, was reprimanded by his fellow soldiers, who called him a coward. Indeed, they were not wrong: air raids are the vilest form of attack. The ignoble merit of being the first European Mediterranean nation to execute a planned air strike goes to Spain, when on 5 November 1913, its air force dropped 10-kilogram bombs on the strongholds of Rif, in North Africa. The latest air strike, I learn from CNN as I write these lines in February 2021, has just taken place a few hours ago, in Syria. In between these dates, thousands of strikes have been carried out which have produced millions of civilian victims. If anyone thinks that the word ‘millions’ here is an exaggeration, they should know that during the Second World War Berlin endured almost four hundred bomb attacks in which some 70,000 tonnes of explosives rained down on the city; and that in Japan, 200,000 people perished in just three days in August 1945. So many attacks and so many victims that no one—ever!—has thought to catalogue and bring to light.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Cristina Lucas corrects this deficit in Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing). The piece, though projected, is not a video as such, but a computer program displaying information on three screens. There is no tape, but instead a succession of data and images. The central screen shows a map of the world on which the names of cities targeted in aerial bombings appear and accumulate. Marks left by air raids are like scars that last forever. The size of each name tag is proportional to the number of casualties inflicted. The way the names move on the screen recalls the drop of the bombs. The screen on the left amplifies the data. Basic information appears in quick succession: name of the conflict, air force responsible, name of the bombed city and number of civilian casualties. Military casualties are not included. The screen on the right shows photographs of the strike, taken by journalists who risked their lives to get them or even by the fighters involved; and, more recently, by the victims themselves who, because of the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras and instant dissemination through social media, have become reporters of their own plight. Not all the photographs are of the victims. We see the technology used, a plane in full flight, preparations on the ground… And as the decades pass, they go from black and white to colour, to the views afforded by modern sophisticated satellite and infrared imaging technologies. Unending Lightning is getting longer and longer, as new data and new images of air strikes continue to emerge and are added to this mammoth, unending investigation.
There is no sound; only a silence that allows you to relive the blast of every explosion. Often, the artist chooses to accompany this piece with another, called Piper Prometeo (2013), which is a video of a small plane flying over an urban landscape trailing a banner with L=(1/2)dv2sCL written on it (this is the ‘lift formula’ that explains how airplanes are able to fly). Here, only the drone of the engine can be heard
IF PICASSO’S WORK IS THE RESULT OF SOMETHING USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH “GENIUS”, CREATED IN THE SOLITUDE OF A PARISIAN ATTIC, UNENDING LIGHTNING IS THE RESULT OF EFFORT. IT AIMS NOT TO FIND THE UNIVERSAL IN THE SPECIFIC, BUT RATHER TO COVER EVERYTHING.
If Picasso’s work is the result of something usually associated with “genius”, created in the solitude of a Parisian attic, Unending Lightning is the result of effort. It aims not to find the universal in the specific, but rather to cover everything. Hours and hours of work undertaken by a fairly sizeable team were necessary to produce the account in a way that had not been done before. Data had to be collected from across multiple sources, from history books to military archives and eyewitness accounts printed in the international press of the day. The focus was aerial bombardments, that is, explosives launched from manned devices that were heavier than air and had killed civilians. It did not include the destruction caused by artillery or self-propelled projectiles such as missiles. The result is a narrative that would seem entirely dispassionate were it not for the accompanying images, which stir our consciences and turn the military’s indifference towards the dead—an indifference that revictimizes them again and again—into the protagonist of story.
With Guernica, we give a European conflict universal significance, as we are wont to do after centuries of Eurocentric chronicling. Unending Lightning is universal at its core for it registers all the bombings that have ever taken place in the world. An attack in Kabul is no less relevant than one in New York, and an attack in Gaza is no less relevant than one in Berlin. Any gradation is in relation to the number of victims. In fact, not only is this piece un-Eurocentric; it shifts the angle on colonization and its consequences. The lines that appear linking each bomb site mirror fairly closely those established by Modern colonialism shaping the world today and which are at the root of so many armed conflicts.
Cristina Lucas, La Liberté Raisonnée, 2009. Video still. Video HD 4:3, 4’50’’. Courtesy of the artist
This piece posits a series of questions that permeate Cristina Lucas’s work generally. Like most of her pieces, it is the result of a performative act, which not only says but does. Indeed, the idea of an action infuses almost every aspect of this work; it is present from the onset. The action common to all its manifestations is the air raid, which is chosen carefully. Only complex manoeuvres that have required meticulous forethought and execution are included. The performativity centres on the human body (it counts the number of corpses, that is, the number of lifeless bodies); and although the viewer is not aware of it, the piece is being done continuously, since a software program reveals and reinterprets data each time the work is activated.
Historical revisionism is another facet of Cristina Lucas’s work. She queries the status quo, hegemonic stories which more often than not have been written by driven, white, European men, who through their appropriation of historiography have conditioned the running of all the mechanisms of power. In La Liberté Raisoneé (2009), she draws inspiration from the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix that speaks of this uncomfortable virtue for which we are compelled to fight. Cristina Lucas asks what would happen if a half-naked woman hoisted a flag in the middle of a battle? Something awful, no doubt. She would probably be raped, beaten, killed. This is what happens in the video. Very slowly, we see the main characters in the painting—all men—capture and attack Liberty. The Enlightenment, which purportedly dispelled darkness and decreed the empire of reason, left women out. Worse still: it subdued them even more, as her piece, Rousseau y Sophie (2007), sets out to prove. In it, she reminds us of how Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contribution to education focused exclusively on male children.2 The book to which the piece alludes accompanies Emile as he grows through life; Sophie, on the other hand, only needs to be educated to be his wife. In Touch and Go (2010) it is the subjugated who are given the chance to write the story. The video shows former Merseyside factory workers who fell victim to Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal greed, now aged and well dressed. One by one, they go back to their former workplaces and throw stones at the few remaining windowpanes still in place in the buildings from which they were driven out, as production was dismantled and relocated to working class areas where oppression was as rife as it was in 19th century Britain.
Cartography—that crude expression of power that divides up land in such a cut and dried and mostly arbitrary way—also features in other pieces, many of which are organised chronologically too. Almost always they are unfinished processes, pieces that will never be completed because (and in this sense they are performative too) they look to both the past and the future of humanity. Pantone -500 +2007 (2007) is a chromatic exercise that gives visibility only to territories shaped by the Western notion of ‘state’, and, therefore, by the division of society into the powerful and the subjugated. A marker tracks the march of time—one second for each year. The changes are only colours that appear and disappear, obeying a logic based on the code devised by the New Jersey-based company some decades ago. Not everything that each change represents is revealed: wars, revolutions and death, many deaths. This cartographical investigation continued with Light Years (2009), in the form of a lightbox in a totally dark exhibition room. Here, there is no screen receiving the light of a projector; rather, it is the work that lights up the room. The marker starts at 1789 and again goes up to the present day. One by one, it indicates the countries where the right to vote has been won, applying a different code in each case: from exclusively male voting reserved only to one sector of society (generally, the white population) to universal suffrage for all those of legal age. An achievement of humanity or a worldwide imposition of European political thought? The piece leaves that tension unresolved; but it celebrates the political visibility of the citizen and leaves in the dark those states that have silenced their citizens for too long. Cartography features again in Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino (2010). Two large globes of the earth each bear the names that genitalia are popularly given in countries around the world. Again, it is the people that draw the map of the world. Every country has its own slang for penis and vulva—two words which are said much more than they are written, and which mark out a geography of the coarse or the untoward.
Cristina Lucas, Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino, 2010. Courtesy of the artist
Possibly the most relevant thing about Unending Lightning is the discussion it elicits around the meaning of work in art and the notion of efficiency. The piece defies the patience of any spectator. The writer of these lines naively decided to view it in its entirety when it was showcased in Madrid in 2017, unaware of how much time it would take. Such an assumption can be applied to the notion of research: What does it mean to research in art? What kind of knowledge can be gained? And how should rigorous information dovetail with viewer experience?
We know that art is one of the most effective ways of learning about history. Most of us in the West learn about Trajan’s victory, the Death of Marat and the July Revolution in high school by looking at artistic depictions of these scenes. But how can we explore something as vast as the history of the last century through a single work of art? Unending Lightning suggests a way while at the same time outlining a role for the artist, for here, we are not merely contemplating an image, but being rigorous. We do not expect an explanation, interpretation or voice, but a story based on verified facts. In the 1990s we started to witness what has become known as the ‘forensic turn’, that is, the increased relevance of the study of material evidence as a way of resisting that old maxim that says that not only is history written by the victors, but that any resistance to the abuse of power and destruction can only result in greater injustice. Eyal Weizman, who applied this maxim to architecture, said that it is possible to understand “the materiality and texture of a building as a surface upon which events get imprinted and upon which process becomes form.”3 In its over fifteen years of activity, the collective he leads—Forensic Architecture—has examined many conflicts and dissected certain specific events in order to identify the attackers of the defenceless and the violators of human rights. Victims are thus given a voice and, more importantly, perpetrators can be brought to trial and convicted thanks to evidence provided by artists. This constitutes a major turning point: the artist is no longer telling a story, but actively contributing elements to its judgment. Cristina Lucas goes a step further: departing from ‘the forensic’, she moves the debate from ostracism into the light, from oblivion to the forum in the etymological sense of the term. She builds on this logic, availing herself of a reversal mechanism that multiplies its meaning. If the forensic strategy means slowing down the succession of events and intensifying sensitivity to space, time and images, Cristina Lucas achieves this by speeding up time and systematizing the study of vast sets of data. In other words, if Weizman spends hours studying what happened in an instant (when a projectile exploded, for example), Lucas spends hours studying what happened in an entire century (when millions of projectiles were fired). It is not just a question of eliciting justice, but also of generating new dynamics of collective mourning, of reuniting the living (and, by extension, those yet to be born) with the dead, and of enabling societies to overcome conflict and reconcile themselves with the pain they have endured.
— Translated from Spanish by Stéphanie Jennings
Ferran Barenblit, Director, MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Ferran Barenblit (b. 1968, Buenos Aires) is a museum director with extensive curatorial experience. Since 2015 he has been the Director of MACBA, where he leads the strategic plan that has taken the organization to a new era, expanded its exhibition spaces and created ambitious intellectual, academic, artistic and audience development initiatives.
Barenblit’s fields of research include: rethinking contemporary institutions under the notion of the “constituent museum”; contemporary art history, with a focus on the 1990s; the role of irony in culture; museum programming strategies; the relationship between art and popular culture – including music and the punk movement. He has a deep interest in generating an intense dialogue among the European countries, and with his native Latin America. He has generated many projects that have travelled from Barcelona/Madrid to Mexico City (MUAC – University Museum Contemporary Art) and Buenos Aires (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Fundación Proa).
His previous institutional experience includes CA2M, Madrid (Director, 2008-2015), CASM, Barcelona (Director, 2002-2008), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (Curator, 1996-2001), and The New Museum, New York (Curatorial Assistant, 1994-1996).
Cristina Lucas, Artist
Cristina Lucas is an artist who lives and works in Madrid. Her work has been included in solo shows, such as “Trading Transcendence” at MUDAM, Luxembourg; “Tod Bringendes Licht” at Kunstraum Innsbruck; “Light Years” at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Móstoles; as well as in group shows, festivals, and biennials, such as Yokohama Triennial, 12 Shanghai Biennale, Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Liverpool Biennial, X Bienal de La Habana, 28 Bienal de Sao Paolo, 10 Istanbul Biennal, among many others.
1 Edwin Honig (ed. and trans.), The Unending Lightning: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990), 15.
2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, 1762
3 Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017)
WHILE BOMBS ARE DROPPING
Ferran Barenblit
Drawing upon Cristina Lucas’s work Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing), Ferran Barenblit gives a historical account of aerial warfare while probing the limits and possibilities of its visual representation by artists.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning, 2015-ongoing. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
[War]
The aged in the villages
Ownerless heart.
Love with no object
Grass, dust and crow.
And youth?
In the coffin
From Unending lightning, 1936 (fragment)
Miguel Hernández1
The most relevant work of Spanish 20th century art, and possibly one of the most recognised all over the world, depicts the horror and death resulting from an aerial bombing.
On 26 April 1937, the town of Gernika (as it is written in Basque) endured one of the most infamous episodes of the Spanish Civil War. Germany’s Condor Legion and Italy’s Aviazione Legionaria, both fighting on the side of the pro-Franco insurgents, carried out a sinister military operation with a degree of force that was entirely disproportionate to the strategic importance of the target. Thirty-one bombers—mainly Junkers Ju 52, emblem of the Nazi air industry—supported by twenty-six fighters offloaded a combination of explosive and incendiary bombs and strafed the civilian population for three endless hours. It was not the first aerial bombing of the Spanish Civil War, far from it: just hours after the military uprising of July 1936, Republican planes improvised an attack on the pro-Franco insurgents’ barracks in North Africa. The airmen’s lack of skill meant that some of the bombs also fell on a nearby mosque and its surroundings, inflicting numerous casualties. As for the bombing of Gernika, many details about it are likely to remain unanswered forever, from what motived the attack and who gave the order, to the true number of victims, now tallied at under three hundred. Over time, this air raid has crystallised into a hard myth, a tableau of Fascist cruelty and the heinousness of war.
In January of that year, Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish government to produce a large canvas for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Expo that was due to open in the summer. Designed by Josep Lluís Sert and Luís Lacasa Navarro, the pavilion also included works by Joan Miró and Alberto Sánchez, among many others (all men, incidentally) and proved to be one of the Republic’s most effective propaganda tools. By now Picasso had been living in France for some years, and his initial indifference towards the Republic had warmed somewhat thanks to the insistence of certain intellectuals in government circles, such as Josep Renau, who felt that Picasso’s already great prestige would be advantageous abroad. Although time was short, four months into the commission, the artist had barely advanced beyond the initial sketches. The news from the Basque Country, however, changed everything and galvanised the artist into completing the work. On 12 July, well behind the Expo’s official opening date, the canvas, measuring 7.75 x 3.5 metres, was finally unveiled alongside the rest of the pavilion’s exhibits. The details of the Guernica commission and its subsequent trajectory have all been meticulously recorded, making it possibly one of the best-documented works in history.
What is it that makes Guernica one of the most relevant works of the 20th century, a symbol of the infinite suffering inflicted by all wars? Were it not for its eloquence and place in history, it is safe to say it would not stand out from other works of art. The fact that it is practically the only ‘political’ work produced by an artist whose subject matters were otherwise conventional—landscapes, still lifes, portraits, bullfighting and some abstraction—makes it a rarity. Perhaps it is its size, its impressive visual language, its compositional open-endedness which allows for multiple readings; its status as bearer of the Republican legacy; its eventful subsequent history; its epic transfer to Spain seen by many as the culminating point of the Spanish transition to democracy… Perhaps it is also the absence of explicit references: the work exudes suffering but does not make clear where or with whom the suffering lies. Local is global; the specific, universal. Whatever it is, there it hangs, in the Reina Sofía Museum, forever drawing in devoted crowds all jostling for a glimpse of the work.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Aerial bombardment might be considered one of the cruellest forms of warfare were it not for the fact that heinousness, having no bounds, has seen military technology devise multiple ways of inflicting suffering and destruction. The ease and indiscriminateness with which most air raids are carried out; the fact that unarmed civilian populations are often the target; and the distance between the attacker and the attacked—likely to subdue any qualms or feelings of compassion in the attacker—all combine to make air bombing a particularly abhorrent outcome of progress. Its advent changed the course of military strategy massively: the soldier who had gone to the front to defend his country and the ‘frail’ (his elders, children, mother, sisters…) now saw them being massacred in his own quest to defeat enemy territory. Perhaps originally the air raid had been intended to discourage those on the ground: if all around lay fellow countrymen and women, what was the point of fighting anymore? At any rate, highlighting such sinister logic has not helped to stop the bloodbath. Air raids are generally unexpected, and victims have almost nowhere to escape to, other than into underground shelters that may not guarantee protection. They are sudden, erratic, over in a flash, and mercilessly fatal. Collateral damage is substantial, even though armies have boasted about having supposedly precise munition ever since the first Gulf War. And the destruction they leave in their wake and the corollary effects (remember Agent Orange in the Vietnam War) only magnify the pain and tragedy.
Aircraft had been incorporated into armies fairly early on. By 1910, just six years after the Wright brothers carried out their first flight, reconnaissance flights were already common practice, intended to obtain information that would give the infantry or artillery an advantage over the enemy. It was during one such air patrol, during the Libyan campaign launched a few months later, that the Italian army dropped the first explosives on enemy lines. It was a spontaneous strike and caused indiscriminate damage. Its perpetrator, a lieutenant, was reprimanded by his fellow soldiers, who called him a coward. Indeed, they were not wrong: air raids are the vilest form of attack. The ignoble merit of being the first European Mediterranean nation to execute a planned air strike goes to Spain, when on 5 November 1913, its air force dropped 10-kilogram bombs on the strongholds of Rif, in North Africa. The latest air strike, I learn from CNN as I write these lines in February 2021, has just taken place a few hours ago, in Syria. In between these dates, thousands of strikes have been carried out which have produced millions of civilian victims. If anyone thinks that the word ‘millions’ here is an exaggeration, they should know that during the Second World War Berlin endured almost four hundred bomb attacks in which some 70,000 tonnes of explosives rained down on the city; and that in Japan, 200,000 people perished in just three days in August 1945. So many attacks and so many victims that no one—ever!—has thought to catalogue and bring to light.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Cristina Lucas corrects this deficit in Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing). The piece, though projected, is not a video as such, but a computer program displaying information on three screens. There is no tape, but instead a succession of data and images. The central screen shows a map of the world on which the names of cities targeted in aerial bombings appear and accumulate. Marks left by air raids are like scars that last forever. The size of each name tag is proportional to the number of casualties inflicted. The way the names move on the screen recalls the drop of the bombs. The screen on the left amplifies the data. Basic information appears in quick succession: name of the conflict, air force responsible, name of the bombed city and number of civilian casualties. Military casualties are not included. The screen on the right shows photographs of the strike, taken by journalists who risked their lives to get them or even by the fighters involved; and, more recently, by the victims themselves who, because of the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras and instant dissemination through social media, have become reporters of their own plight. Not all the photographs are of the victims. We see the technology used, a plane in full flight, preparations on the ground… And as the decades pass, they go from black and white to colour, to the views afforded by modern sophisticated satellite and infrared imaging technologies. Unending Lightning is getting longer and longer, as new data and new images of air strikes continue to emerge and are added to this mammoth, unending investigation.
There is no sound; only a silence that allows you to relive the blast of every explosion. Often, the artist chooses to accompany this piece with another, called Piper Prometeo (2013), which is a video of a small plane flying over an urban landscape trailing a banner with L=(1/2)dv2sCL written on it (this is the ‘lift formula’ that explains how airplanes are able to fly). Here, only the drone of the engine can be heard
IF PICASSO’S WORK IS THE RESULT OF SOMETHING USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH “GENIUS”, CREATED IN THE SOLITUDE OF A PARISIAN ATTIC, UNENDING LIGHTNING IS THE RESULT OF EFFORT. IT AIMS NOT TO FIND THE UNIVERSAL IN THE SPECIFIC, BUT RATHER TO COVER EVERYTHING.
If Picasso’s work is the result of something usually associated with “genius”, created in the solitude of a Parisian attic, Unending Lightning is the result of effort. It aims not to find the universal in the specific, but rather to cover everything. Hours and hours of work undertaken by a fairly sizeable team were necessary to produce the account in a way that had not been done before. Data had to be collected from across multiple sources, from history books to military archives and eyewitness accounts printed in the international press of the day. The focus was aerial bombardments, that is, explosives launched from manned devices that were heavier than air and had killed civilians. It did not include the destruction caused by artillery or self-propelled projectiles such as missiles. The result is a narrative that would seem entirely dispassionate were it not for the accompanying images, which stir our consciences and turn the military’s indifference towards the dead—an indifference that revictimizes them again and again—into the protagonist of story.
With Guernica, we give a European conflict universal significance, as we are wont to do after centuries of Eurocentric chronicling. Unending Lightning is universal at its core for it registers all the bombings that have ever taken place in the world. An attack in Kabul is no less relevant than one in New York, and an attack in Gaza is no less relevant than one in Berlin. Any gradation is in relation to the number of victims. In fact, not only is this piece un-Eurocentric; it shifts the angle on colonization and its consequences. The lines that appear linking each bomb site mirror fairly closely those established by Modern colonialism shaping the world today and which are at the root of so many armed conflicts.
Cristina Lucas, La Liberté Raisonnée, 2009. Video still. Video HD 4:3, 4’50’’. Courtesy of the artist
This piece posits a series of questions that permeate Cristina Lucas’s work generally. Like most of her pieces, it is the result of a performative act, which not only says but does. Indeed, the idea of an action infuses almost every aspect of this work; it is present from the onset. The action common to all its manifestations is the air raid, which is chosen carefully. Only complex manoeuvres that have required meticulous forethought and execution are included. The performativity centres on the human body (it counts the number of corpses, that is, the number of lifeless bodies); and although the viewer is not aware of it, the piece is being done continuously, since a software program reveals and reinterprets data each time the work is activated.
Historical revisionism is another facet of Cristina Lucas’s work. She queries the status quo, hegemonic stories which more often than not have been written by driven, white, European men, who through their appropriation of historiography have conditioned the running of all the mechanisms of power. In La Liberté Raisoneé (2009), she draws inspiration from the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix that speaks of this uncomfortable virtue for which we are compelled to fight. Cristina Lucas asks what would happen if a half-naked woman hoisted a flag in the middle of a battle? Something awful, no doubt. She would probably be raped, beaten, killed. This is what happens in the video. Very slowly, we see the main characters in the painting—all men—capture and attack Liberty. The Enlightenment, which purportedly dispelled darkness and decreed the empire of reason, left women out. Worse still: it subdued them even more, as her piece, Rousseau y Sophie (2007), sets out to prove. In it, she reminds us of how Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contribution to education focused exclusively on male children.2 The book to which the piece alludes accompanies Emile as he grows through life; Sophie, on the other hand, only needs to be educated to be his wife. In Touch and Go (2010) it is the subjugated who are given the chance to write the story. The video shows former Merseyside factory workers who fell victim to Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal greed, now aged and well dressed. One by one, they go back to their former workplaces and throw stones at the few remaining windowpanes still in place in the buildings from which they were driven out, as production was dismantled and relocated to working class areas where oppression was as rife as it was in 19th century Britain.
Cartography—that crude expression of power that divides up land in such a cut and dried and mostly arbitrary way—also features in other pieces, many of which are organised chronologically too. Almost always they are unfinished processes, pieces that will never be completed because (and in this sense they are performative too) they look to both the past and the future of humanity. Pantone -500 +2007 (2007) is a chromatic exercise that gives visibility only to territories shaped by the Western notion of ‘state’, and, therefore, by the division of society into the powerful and the subjugated. A marker tracks the march of time—one second for each year. The changes are only colours that appear and disappear, obeying a logic based on the code devised by the New Jersey-based company some decades ago. Not everything that each change represents is revealed: wars, revolutions and death, many deaths. This cartographical investigation continued with Light Years (2009), in the form of a lightbox in a totally dark exhibition room. Here, there is no screen receiving the light of a projector; rather, it is the work that lights up the room. The marker starts at 1789 and again goes up to the present day. One by one, it indicates the countries where the right to vote has been won, applying a different code in each case: from exclusively male voting reserved only to one sector of society (generally, the white population) to universal suffrage for all those of legal age. An achievement of humanity or a worldwide imposition of European political thought? The piece leaves that tension unresolved; but it celebrates the political visibility of the citizen and leaves in the dark those states that have silenced their citizens for too long. Cartography features again in Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino (2010). Two large globes of the earth each bear the names that genitalia are popularly given in countries around the world. Again, it is the people that draw the map of the world. Every country has its own slang for penis and vulva—two words which are said much more than they are written, and which mark out a geography of the coarse or the untoward.
Cristina Lucas, Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino, 2010. Courtesy of the artist
Possibly the most relevant thing about Unending Lightning is the discussion it elicits around the meaning of work in art and the notion of efficiency. The piece defies the patience of any spectator. The writer of these lines naively decided to view it in its entirety when it was showcased in Madrid in 2017, unaware of how much time it would take. Such an assumption can be applied to the notion of research: What does it mean to research in art? What kind of knowledge can be gained? And how should rigorous information dovetail with viewer experience?
We know that art is one of the most effective ways of learning about history. Most of us in the West learn about Trajan’s victory, the Death of Marat and the July Revolution in high school by looking at artistic depictions of these scenes. But how can we explore something as vast as the history of the last century through a single work of art? Unending Lightning suggests a way while at the same time outlining a role for the artist, for here, we are not merely contemplating an image, but being rigorous. We do not expect an explanation, interpretation or voice, but a story based on verified facts. In the 1990s we started to witness what has become known as the ‘forensic turn’, that is, the increased relevance of the study of material evidence as a way of resisting that old maxim that says that not only is history written by the victors, but that any resistance to the abuse of power and destruction can only result in greater injustice. Eyal Weizman, who applied this maxim to architecture, said that it is possible to understand “the materiality and texture of a building as a surface upon which events get imprinted and upon which process becomes form.”3 In its over fifteen years of activity, the collective he leads—Forensic Architecture—has examined many conflicts and dissected certain specific events in order to identify the attackers of the defenceless and the violators of human rights. Victims are thus given a voice and, more importantly, perpetrators can be brought to trial and convicted thanks to evidence provided by artists. This constitutes a major turning point: the artist is no longer telling a story, but actively contributing elements to its judgment. Cristina Lucas goes a step further: departing from ‘the forensic’, she moves the debate from ostracism into the light, from oblivion to the forum in the etymological sense of the term. She builds on this logic, availing herself of a reversal mechanism that multiplies its meaning. If the forensic strategy means slowing down the succession of events and intensifying sensitivity to space, time and images, Cristina Lucas achieves this by speeding up time and systematizing the study of vast sets of data. In other words, if Weizman spends hours studying what happened in an instant (when a projectile exploded, for example), Lucas spends hours studying what happened in an entire century (when millions of projectiles were fired). It is not just a question of eliciting justice, but also of generating new dynamics of collective mourning, of reuniting the living (and, by extension, those yet to be born) with the dead, and of enabling societies to overcome conflict and reconcile themselves with the pain they have endured.
— Translated from Spanish by Stéphanie Jennings
Ferran Barenblit, Director, MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Ferran Barenblit (b. 1968, Buenos Aires) is a museum director with extensive curatorial experience. Since 2015 he has been the Director of MACBA, where he leads the strategic plan that has taken the organization to a new era, expanded its exhibition spaces and created ambitious intellectual, academic, artistic and audience development initiatives.
Barenblit’s fields of research include: rethinking contemporary institutions under the notion of the “constituent museum”; contemporary art history, with a focus on the 1990s; the role of irony in culture; museum programming strategies; the relationship between art and popular culture – including music and the punk movement. He has a deep interest in generating an intense dialogue among the European countries, and with his native Latin America. He has generated many projects that have travelled from Barcelona/Madrid to Mexico City (MUAC – University Museum Contemporary Art) and Buenos Aires (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Fundación Proa).
His previous institutional experience includes CA2M, Madrid (Director, 2008-2015), CASM, Barcelona (Director, 2002-2008), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (Curator, 1996-2001), and The New Museum, New York (Curatorial Assistant, 1994-1996).
Cristina Lucas, Artist
Cristina Lucas is an artist who lives and works in Madrid. Her work has been included in solo shows, such as “Trading Transcendence” at MUDAM, Luxembourg; “Tod Bringendes Licht” at Kunstraum Innsbruck; “Light Years” at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Móstoles; as well as in group shows, festivals, and biennials, such as Yokohama Triennial, 12 Shanghai Biennale, Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Liverpool Biennial, X Bienal de La Habana, 28 Bienal de Sao Paolo, 10 Istanbul Biennal, among many others.
1 Edwin Honig (ed. and trans.), The Unending Lightning: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990), 15.
2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, 1762
3 Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017)
WHILE BOMBS ARE DROPPING
Ferran Barenblit
Drawing upon Cristina Lucas’s work Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing), Ferran Barenblit gives a historical account of aerial warfare while probing the limits and possibilities of its visual representation by artists.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning, 2015-ongoing. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
[War]
The aged in the villages
Ownerless heart.
Love with no object
Grass, dust and crow.
And youth?
In the coffin
From Unending lightning, 1936 (fragment)
Miguel Hernández1
The most relevant work of Spanish 20th century art, and possibly one of the most recognised all over the world, depicts the horror and death resulting from an aerial bombing.
On 26 April 1937, the town of Gernika (as it is written in Basque) endured one of the most infamous episodes of the Spanish Civil War. Germany’s Condor Legion and Italy’s Aviazione Legionaria, both fighting on the side of the pro-Franco insurgents, carried out a sinister military operation with a degree of force that was entirely disproportionate to the strategic importance of the target. Thirty-one bombers—mainly Junkers Ju 52, emblem of the Nazi air industry—supported by twenty-six fighters offloaded a combination of explosive and incendiary bombs and strafed the civilian population for three endless hours. It was not the first aerial bombing of the Spanish Civil War, far from it: just hours after the military uprising of July 1936, Republican planes improvised an attack on the pro-Franco insurgents’ barracks in North Africa. The airmen’s lack of skill meant that some of the bombs also fell on a nearby mosque and its surroundings, inflicting numerous casualties. As for the bombing of Gernika, many details about it are likely to remain unanswered forever, from what motived the attack and who gave the order, to the true number of victims, now tallied at under three hundred. Over time, this air raid has crystallised into a hard myth, a tableau of Fascist cruelty and the heinousness of war.
In January of that year, Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish government to produce a large canvas for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Expo that was due to open in the summer. Designed by Josep Lluís Sert and Luís Lacasa Navarro, the pavilion also included works by Joan Miró and Alberto Sánchez, among many others (all men, incidentally) and proved to be one of the Republic’s most effective propaganda tools. By now Picasso had been living in France for some years, and his initial indifference towards the Republic had warmed somewhat thanks to the insistence of certain intellectuals in government circles, such as Josep Renau, who felt that Picasso’s already great prestige would be advantageous abroad. Although time was short, four months into the commission, the artist had barely advanced beyond the initial sketches. The news from the Basque Country, however, changed everything and galvanised the artist into completing the work. On 12 July, well behind the Expo’s official opening date, the canvas, measuring 7.75 x 3.5 metres, was finally unveiled alongside the rest of the pavilion’s exhibits. The details of the Guernica commission and its subsequent trajectory have all been meticulously recorded, making it possibly one of the best-documented works in history.
What is it that makes Guernica one of the most relevant works of the 20th century, a symbol of the infinite suffering inflicted by all wars? Were it not for its eloquence and place in history, it is safe to say it would not stand out from other works of art. The fact that it is practically the only ‘political’ work produced by an artist whose subject matters were otherwise conventional—landscapes, still lifes, portraits, bullfighting and some abstraction—makes it a rarity. Perhaps it is its size, its impressive visual language, its compositional open-endedness which allows for multiple readings; its status as bearer of the Republican legacy; its eventful subsequent history; its epic transfer to Spain seen by many as the culminating point of the Spanish transition to democracy… Perhaps it is also the absence of explicit references: the work exudes suffering but does not make clear where or with whom the suffering lies. Local is global; the specific, universal. Whatever it is, there it hangs, in the Reina Sofía Museum, forever drawing in devoted crowds all jostling for a glimpse of the work.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Aerial bombardment might be considered one of the cruellest forms of warfare were it not for the fact that heinousness, having no bounds, has seen military technology devise multiple ways of inflicting suffering and destruction. The ease and indiscriminateness with which most air raids are carried out; the fact that unarmed civilian populations are often the target; and the distance between the attacker and the attacked—likely to subdue any qualms or feelings of compassion in the attacker—all combine to make air bombing a particularly abhorrent outcome of progress. Its advent changed the course of military strategy massively: the soldier who had gone to the front to defend his country and the ‘frail’ (his elders, children, mother, sisters…) now saw them being massacred in his own quest to defeat enemy territory. Perhaps originally the air raid had been intended to discourage those on the ground: if all around lay fellow countrymen and women, what was the point of fighting anymore? At any rate, highlighting such sinister logic has not helped to stop the bloodbath. Air raids are generally unexpected, and victims have almost nowhere to escape to, other than into underground shelters that may not guarantee protection. They are sudden, erratic, over in a flash, and mercilessly fatal. Collateral damage is substantial, even though armies have boasted about having supposedly precise munition ever since the first Gulf War. And the destruction they leave in their wake and the corollary effects (remember Agent Orange in the Vietnam War) only magnify the pain and tragedy.
Aircraft had been incorporated into armies fairly early on. By 1910, just six years after the Wright brothers carried out their first flight, reconnaissance flights were already common practice, intended to obtain information that would give the infantry or artillery an advantage over the enemy. It was during one such air patrol, during the Libyan campaign launched a few months later, that the Italian army dropped the first explosives on enemy lines. It was a spontaneous strike and caused indiscriminate damage. Its perpetrator, a lieutenant, was reprimanded by his fellow soldiers, who called him a coward. Indeed, they were not wrong: air raids are the vilest form of attack. The ignoble merit of being the first European Mediterranean nation to execute a planned air strike goes to Spain, when on 5 November 1913, its air force dropped 10-kilogram bombs on the strongholds of Rif, in North Africa. The latest air strike, I learn from CNN as I write these lines in February 2021, has just taken place a few hours ago, in Syria. In between these dates, thousands of strikes have been carried out which have produced millions of civilian victims. If anyone thinks that the word ‘millions’ here is an exaggeration, they should know that during the Second World War Berlin endured almost four hundred bomb attacks in which some 70,000 tonnes of explosives rained down on the city; and that in Japan, 200,000 people perished in just three days in August 1945. So many attacks and so many victims that no one—ever!—has thought to catalogue and bring to light.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Cristina Lucas corrects this deficit in Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing). The piece, though projected, is not a video as such, but a computer program displaying information on three screens. There is no tape, but instead a succession of data and images. The central screen shows a map of the world on which the names of cities targeted in aerial bombings appear and accumulate. Marks left by air raids are like scars that last forever. The size of each name tag is proportional to the number of casualties inflicted. The way the names move on the screen recalls the drop of the bombs. The screen on the left amplifies the data. Basic information appears in quick succession: name of the conflict, air force responsible, name of the bombed city and number of civilian casualties. Military casualties are not included. The screen on the right shows photographs of the strike, taken by journalists who risked their lives to get them or even by the fighters involved; and, more recently, by the victims themselves who, because of the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras and instant dissemination through social media, have become reporters of their own plight. Not all the photographs are of the victims. We see the technology used, a plane in full flight, preparations on the ground… And as the decades pass, they go from black and white to colour, to the views afforded by modern sophisticated satellite and infrared imaging technologies. Unending Lightning is getting longer and longer, as new data and new images of air strikes continue to emerge and are added to this mammoth, unending investigation.
There is no sound; only a silence that allows you to relive the blast of every explosion. Often, the artist chooses to accompany this piece with another, called Piper Prometeo (2013), which is a video of a small plane flying over an urban landscape trailing a banner with L=(1/2)dv2sCL written on it (this is the ‘lift formula’ that explains how airplanes are able to fly). Here, only the drone of the engine can be heard
IF PICASSO’S WORK IS THE RESULT OF SOMETHING USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH “GENIUS”, CREATED IN THE SOLITUDE OF A PARISIAN ATTIC, UNENDING LIGHTNING IS THE RESULT OF EFFORT. IT AIMS NOT TO FIND THE UNIVERSAL IN THE SPECIFIC, BUT RATHER TO COVER EVERYTHING.
If Picasso’s work is the result of something usually associated with “genius”, created in the solitude of a Parisian attic, Unending Lightning is the result of effort. It aims not to find the universal in the specific, but rather to cover everything. Hours and hours of work undertaken by a fairly sizeable team were necessary to produce the account in a way that had not been done before. Data had to be collected from across multiple sources, from history books to military archives and eyewitness accounts printed in the international press of the day. The focus was aerial bombardments, that is, explosives launched from manned devices that were heavier than air and had killed civilians. It did not include the destruction caused by artillery or self-propelled projectiles such as missiles. The result is a narrative that would seem entirely dispassionate were it not for the accompanying images, which stir our consciences and turn the military’s indifference towards the dead—an indifference that revictimizes them again and again—into the protagonist of story.
With Guernica, we give a European conflict universal significance, as we are wont to do after centuries of Eurocentric chronicling. Unending Lightning is universal at its core for it registers all the bombings that have ever taken place in the world. An attack in Kabul is no less relevant than one in New York, and an attack in Gaza is no less relevant than one in Berlin. Any gradation is in relation to the number of victims. In fact, not only is this piece un-Eurocentric; it shifts the angle on colonization and its consequences. The lines that appear linking each bomb site mirror fairly closely those established by Modern colonialism shaping the world today and which are at the root of so many armed conflicts.
Cristina Lucas, La Liberté Raisonnée, 2009. Video still. Video HD 4:3, 4’50’’. Courtesy of the artist
This piece posits a series of questions that permeate Cristina Lucas’s work generally. Like most of her pieces, it is the result of a performative act, which not only says but does. Indeed, the idea of an action infuses almost every aspect of this work; it is present from the onset. The action common to all its manifestations is the air raid, which is chosen carefully. Only complex manoeuvres that have required meticulous forethought and execution are included. The performativity centres on the human body (it counts the number of corpses, that is, the number of lifeless bodies); and although the viewer is not aware of it, the piece is being done continuously, since a software program reveals and reinterprets data each time the work is activated.
Historical revisionism is another facet of Cristina Lucas’s work. She queries the status quo, hegemonic stories which more often than not have been written by driven, white, European men, who through their appropriation of historiography have conditioned the running of all the mechanisms of power. In La Liberté Raisoneé (2009), she draws inspiration from the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix that speaks of this uncomfortable virtue for which we are compelled to fight. Cristina Lucas asks what would happen if a half-naked woman hoisted a flag in the middle of a battle? Something awful, no doubt. She would probably be raped, beaten, killed. This is what happens in the video. Very slowly, we see the main characters in the painting—all men—capture and attack Liberty. The Enlightenment, which purportedly dispelled darkness and decreed the empire of reason, left women out. Worse still: it subdued them even more, as her piece, Rousseau y Sophie (2007), sets out to prove. In it, she reminds us of how Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contribution to education focused exclusively on male children.2 The book to which the piece alludes accompanies Emile as he grows through life; Sophie, on the other hand, only needs to be educated to be his wife. In Touch and Go (2010) it is the subjugated who are given the chance to write the story. The video shows former Merseyside factory workers who fell victim to Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal greed, now aged and well dressed. One by one, they go back to their former workplaces and throw stones at the few remaining windowpanes still in place in the buildings from which they were driven out, as production was dismantled and relocated to working class areas where oppression was as rife as it was in 19th century Britain.
Cartography—that crude expression of power that divides up land in such a cut and dried and mostly arbitrary way—also features in other pieces, many of which are organised chronologically too. Almost always they are unfinished processes, pieces that will never be completed because (and in this sense they are performative too) they look to both the past and the future of humanity. Pantone -500 +2007 (2007) is a chromatic exercise that gives visibility only to territories shaped by the Western notion of ‘state’, and, therefore, by the division of society into the powerful and the subjugated. A marker tracks the march of time—one second for each year. The changes are only colours that appear and disappear, obeying a logic based on the code devised by the New Jersey-based company some decades ago. Not everything that each change represents is revealed: wars, revolutions and death, many deaths. This cartographical investigation continued with Light Years (2009), in the form of a lightbox in a totally dark exhibition room. Here, there is no screen receiving the light of a projector; rather, it is the work that lights up the room. The marker starts at 1789 and again goes up to the present day. One by one, it indicates the countries where the right to vote has been won, applying a different code in each case: from exclusively male voting reserved only to one sector of society (generally, the white population) to universal suffrage for all those of legal age. An achievement of humanity or a worldwide imposition of European political thought? The piece leaves that tension unresolved; but it celebrates the political visibility of the citizen and leaves in the dark those states that have silenced their citizens for too long. Cartography features again in Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino (2010). Two large globes of the earth each bear the names that genitalia are popularly given in countries around the world. Again, it is the people that draw the map of the world. Every country has its own slang for penis and vulva—two words which are said much more than they are written, and which mark out a geography of the coarse or the untoward.
Cristina Lucas, Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino, 2010. Courtesy of the artist
Possibly the most relevant thing about Unending Lightning is the discussion it elicits around the meaning of work in art and the notion of efficiency. The piece defies the patience of any spectator. The writer of these lines naively decided to view it in its entirety when it was showcased in Madrid in 2017, unaware of how much time it would take. Such an assumption can be applied to the notion of research: What does it mean to research in art? What kind of knowledge can be gained? And how should rigorous information dovetail with viewer experience?
We know that art is one of the most effective ways of learning about history. Most of us in the West learn about Trajan’s victory, the Death of Marat and the July Revolution in high school by looking at artistic depictions of these scenes. But how can we explore something as vast as the history of the last century through a single work of art? Unending Lightning suggests a way while at the same time outlining a role for the artist, for here, we are not merely contemplating an image, but being rigorous. We do not expect an explanation, interpretation or voice, but a story based on verified facts. In the 1990s we started to witness what has become known as the ‘forensic turn’, that is, the increased relevance of the study of material evidence as a way of resisting that old maxim that says that not only is history written by the victors, but that any resistance to the abuse of power and destruction can only result in greater injustice. Eyal Weizman, who applied this maxim to architecture, said that it is possible to understand “the materiality and texture of a building as a surface upon which events get imprinted and upon which process becomes form.”3 In its over fifteen years of activity, the collective he leads—Forensic Architecture—has examined many conflicts and dissected certain specific events in order to identify the attackers of the defenceless and the violators of human rights. Victims are thus given a voice and, more importantly, perpetrators can be brought to trial and convicted thanks to evidence provided by artists. This constitutes a major turning point: the artist is no longer telling a story, but actively contributing elements to its judgment. Cristina Lucas goes a step further: departing from ‘the forensic’, she moves the debate from ostracism into the light, from oblivion to the forum in the etymological sense of the term. She builds on this logic, availing herself of a reversal mechanism that multiplies its meaning. If the forensic strategy means slowing down the succession of events and intensifying sensitivity to space, time and images, Cristina Lucas achieves this by speeding up time and systematizing the study of vast sets of data. In other words, if Weizman spends hours studying what happened in an instant (when a projectile exploded, for example), Lucas spends hours studying what happened in an entire century (when millions of projectiles were fired). It is not just a question of eliciting justice, but also of generating new dynamics of collective mourning, of reuniting the living (and, by extension, those yet to be born) with the dead, and of enabling societies to overcome conflict and reconcile themselves with the pain they have endured.
— Translated from Spanish by Stéphanie Jennings
Ferran Barenblit, Director, MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Ferran Barenblit (b. 1968, Buenos Aires) is a museum director with extensive curatorial experience. Since 2015 he has been the Director of MACBA, where he leads the strategic plan that has taken the organization to a new era, expanded its exhibition spaces and created ambitious intellectual, academic, artistic and audience development initiatives.
Barenblit’s fields of research include: rethinking contemporary institutions under the notion of the “constituent museum”; contemporary art history, with a focus on the 1990s; the role of irony in culture; museum programming strategies; the relationship between art and popular culture – including music and the punk movement. He has a deep interest in generating an intense dialogue among the European countries, and with his native Latin America. He has generated many projects that have travelled from Barcelona/Madrid to Mexico City (MUAC – University Museum Contemporary Art) and Buenos Aires (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Fundación Proa).
His previous institutional experience includes CA2M, Madrid (Director, 2008-2015), CASM, Barcelona (Director, 2002-2008), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (Curator, 1996-2001), and The New Museum, New York (Curatorial Assistant, 1994-1996).
Cristina Lucas, Artist
Cristina Lucas is an artist who lives and works in Madrid. Her work has been included in solo shows, such as “Trading Transcendence” at MUDAM, Luxembourg; “Tod Bringendes Licht” at Kunstraum Innsbruck; “Light Years” at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Móstoles; as well as in group shows, festivals, and biennials, such as Yokohama Triennial, 12 Shanghai Biennale, Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Liverpool Biennial, X Bienal de La Habana, 28 Bienal de Sao Paolo, 10 Istanbul Biennal, among many others.
1 Edwin Honig (ed. and trans.), The Unending Lightning: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990), 15.
2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, 1762
3 Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017)
WHILE BOMBS ARE DROPPING
Ferran Barenblit
Drawing upon Cristina Lucas’s work Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing), Ferran Barenblit gives a historical account of aerial warfare while probing the limits and possibilities of its visual representation by artists.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning, 2015-ongoing. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
[War]
The aged in the villages
Ownerless heart.
Love with no object
Grass, dust and crow.
And youth?
In the coffin
From Unending lightning, 1936 (fragment)
Miguel Hernández1
The most relevant work of Spanish 20th century art, and possibly one of the most recognised all over the world, depicts the horror and death resulting from an aerial bombing.
On 26 April 1937, the town of Gernika (as it is written in Basque) endured one of the most infamous episodes of the Spanish Civil War. Germany’s Condor Legion and Italy’s Aviazione Legionaria, both fighting on the side of the pro-Franco insurgents, carried out a sinister military operation with a degree of force that was entirely disproportionate to the strategic importance of the target. Thirty-one bombers—mainly Junkers Ju 52, emblem of the Nazi air industry—supported by twenty-six fighters offloaded a combination of explosive and incendiary bombs and strafed the civilian population for three endless hours. It was not the first aerial bombing of the Spanish Civil War, far from it: just hours after the military uprising of July 1936, Republican planes improvised an attack on the pro-Franco insurgents’ barracks in North Africa. The airmen’s lack of skill meant that some of the bombs also fell on a nearby mosque and its surroundings, inflicting numerous casualties. As for the bombing of Gernika, many details about it are likely to remain unanswered forever, from what motived the attack and who gave the order, to the true number of victims, now tallied at under three hundred. Over time, this air raid has crystallised into a hard myth, a tableau of Fascist cruelty and the heinousness of war.
In January of that year, Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish government to produce a large canvas for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Expo that was due to open in the summer. Designed by Josep Lluís Sert and Luís Lacasa Navarro, the pavilion also included works by Joan Miró and Alberto Sánchez, among many others (all men, incidentally) and proved to be one of the Republic’s most effective propaganda tools. By now Picasso had been living in France for some years, and his initial indifference towards the Republic had warmed somewhat thanks to the insistence of certain intellectuals in government circles, such as Josep Renau, who felt that Picasso’s already great prestige would be advantageous abroad. Although time was short, four months into the commission, the artist had barely advanced beyond the initial sketches. The news from the Basque Country, however, changed everything and galvanised the artist into completing the work. On 12 July, well behind the Expo’s official opening date, the canvas, measuring 7.75 x 3.5 metres, was finally unveiled alongside the rest of the pavilion’s exhibits. The details of the Guernica commission and its subsequent trajectory have all been meticulously recorded, making it possibly one of the best-documented works in history.
What is it that makes Guernica one of the most relevant works of the 20th century, a symbol of the infinite suffering inflicted by all wars? Were it not for its eloquence and place in history, it is safe to say it would not stand out from other works of art. The fact that it is practically the only ‘political’ work produced by an artist whose subject matters were otherwise conventional—landscapes, still lifes, portraits, bullfighting and some abstraction—makes it a rarity. Perhaps it is its size, its impressive visual language, its compositional open-endedness which allows for multiple readings; its status as bearer of the Republican legacy; its eventful subsequent history; its epic transfer to Spain seen by many as the culminating point of the Spanish transition to democracy… Perhaps it is also the absence of explicit references: the work exudes suffering but does not make clear where or with whom the suffering lies. Local is global; the specific, universal. Whatever it is, there it hangs, in the Reina Sofía Museum, forever drawing in devoted crowds all jostling for a glimpse of the work.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Aerial bombardment might be considered one of the cruellest forms of warfare were it not for the fact that heinousness, having no bounds, has seen military technology devise multiple ways of inflicting suffering and destruction. The ease and indiscriminateness with which most air raids are carried out; the fact that unarmed civilian populations are often the target; and the distance between the attacker and the attacked—likely to subdue any qualms or feelings of compassion in the attacker—all combine to make air bombing a particularly abhorrent outcome of progress. Its advent changed the course of military strategy massively: the soldier who had gone to the front to defend his country and the ‘frail’ (his elders, children, mother, sisters…) now saw them being massacred in his own quest to defeat enemy territory. Perhaps originally the air raid had been intended to discourage those on the ground: if all around lay fellow countrymen and women, what was the point of fighting anymore? At any rate, highlighting such sinister logic has not helped to stop the bloodbath. Air raids are generally unexpected, and victims have almost nowhere to escape to, other than into underground shelters that may not guarantee protection. They are sudden, erratic, over in a flash, and mercilessly fatal. Collateral damage is substantial, even though armies have boasted about having supposedly precise munition ever since the first Gulf War. And the destruction they leave in their wake and the corollary effects (remember Agent Orange in the Vietnam War) only magnify the pain and tragedy.
Aircraft had been incorporated into armies fairly early on. By 1910, just six years after the Wright brothers carried out their first flight, reconnaissance flights were already common practice, intended to obtain information that would give the infantry or artillery an advantage over the enemy. It was during one such air patrol, during the Libyan campaign launched a few months later, that the Italian army dropped the first explosives on enemy lines. It was a spontaneous strike and caused indiscriminate damage. Its perpetrator, a lieutenant, was reprimanded by his fellow soldiers, who called him a coward. Indeed, they were not wrong: air raids are the vilest form of attack. The ignoble merit of being the first European Mediterranean nation to execute a planned air strike goes to Spain, when on 5 November 1913, its air force dropped 10-kilogram bombs on the strongholds of Rif, in North Africa. The latest air strike, I learn from CNN as I write these lines in February 2021, has just taken place a few hours ago, in Syria. In between these dates, thousands of strikes have been carried out which have produced millions of civilian victims. If anyone thinks that the word ‘millions’ here is an exaggeration, they should know that during the Second World War Berlin endured almost four hundred bomb attacks in which some 70,000 tonnes of explosives rained down on the city; and that in Japan, 200,000 people perished in just three days in August 1945. So many attacks and so many victims that no one—ever!—has thought to catalogue and bring to light.
Cristina Lucas, Unending Lightning (detail), 2015-ongoing. Video still. 3 Channel Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection
Cristina Lucas corrects this deficit in Unending Lightning (2015-ongoing). The piece, though projected, is not a video as such, but a computer program displaying information on three screens. There is no tape, but instead a succession of data and images. The central screen shows a map of the world on which the names of cities targeted in aerial bombings appear and accumulate. Marks left by air raids are like scars that last forever. The size of each name tag is proportional to the number of casualties inflicted. The way the names move on the screen recalls the drop of the bombs. The screen on the left amplifies the data. Basic information appears in quick succession: name of the conflict, air force responsible, name of the bombed city and number of civilian casualties. Military casualties are not included. The screen on the right shows photographs of the strike, taken by journalists who risked their lives to get them or even by the fighters involved; and, more recently, by the victims themselves who, because of the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras and instant dissemination through social media, have become reporters of their own plight. Not all the photographs are of the victims. We see the technology used, a plane in full flight, preparations on the ground… And as the decades pass, they go from black and white to colour, to the views afforded by modern sophisticated satellite and infrared imaging technologies. Unending Lightning is getting longer and longer, as new data and new images of air strikes continue to emerge and are added to this mammoth, unending investigation.
There is no sound; only a silence that allows you to relive the blast of every explosion. Often, the artist chooses to accompany this piece with another, called Piper Prometeo (2013), which is a video of a small plane flying over an urban landscape trailing a banner with L=(1/2)dv2sCL written on it (this is the ‘lift formula’ that explains how airplanes are able to fly). Here, only the drone of the engine can be heard
IF PICASSO’S WORK IS THE RESULT OF SOMETHING USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH “GENIUS”, CREATED IN THE SOLITUDE OF A PARISIAN ATTIC, UNENDING LIGHTNING IS THE RESULT OF EFFORT. IT AIMS NOT TO FIND THE UNIVERSAL IN THE SPECIFIC, BUT RATHER TO COVER EVERYTHING.
If Picasso’s work is the result of something usually associated with “genius”, created in the solitude of a Parisian attic, Unending Lightning is the result of effort. It aims not to find the universal in the specific, but rather to cover everything. Hours and hours of work undertaken by a fairly sizeable team were necessary to produce the account in a way that had not been done before. Data had to be collected from across multiple sources, from history books to military archives and eyewitness accounts printed in the international press of the day. The focus was aerial bombardments, that is, explosives launched from manned devices that were heavier than air and had killed civilians. It did not include the destruction caused by artillery or self-propelled projectiles such as missiles. The result is a narrative that would seem entirely dispassionate were it not for the accompanying images, which stir our consciences and turn the military’s indifference towards the dead—an indifference that revictimizes them again and again—into the protagonist of story.
With Guernica, we give a European conflict universal significance, as we are wont to do after centuries of Eurocentric chronicling. Unending Lightning is universal at its core for it registers all the bombings that have ever taken place in the world. An attack in Kabul is no less relevant than one in New York, and an attack in Gaza is no less relevant than one in Berlin. Any gradation is in relation to the number of victims. In fact, not only is this piece un-Eurocentric; it shifts the angle on colonization and its consequences. The lines that appear linking each bomb site mirror fairly closely those established by Modern colonialism shaping the world today and which are at the root of so many armed conflicts.
Cristina Lucas, La Liberté Raisonnée, 2009. Video still. Video HD 4:3, 4’50’’. Courtesy of the artist
This piece posits a series of questions that permeate Cristina Lucas’s work generally. Like most of her pieces, it is the result of a performative act, which not only says but does. Indeed, the idea of an action infuses almost every aspect of this work; it is present from the onset. The action common to all its manifestations is the air raid, which is chosen carefully. Only complex manoeuvres that have required meticulous forethought and execution are included. The performativity centres on the human body (it counts the number of corpses, that is, the number of lifeless bodies); and although the viewer is not aware of it, the piece is being done continuously, since a software program reveals and reinterprets data each time the work is activated.
Historical revisionism is another facet of Cristina Lucas’s work. She queries the status quo, hegemonic stories which more often than not have been written by driven, white, European men, who through their appropriation of historiography have conditioned the running of all the mechanisms of power. In La Liberté Raisoneé (2009), she draws inspiration from the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix that speaks of this uncomfortable virtue for which we are compelled to fight. Cristina Lucas asks what would happen if a half-naked woman hoisted a flag in the middle of a battle? Something awful, no doubt. She would probably be raped, beaten, killed. This is what happens in the video. Very slowly, we see the main characters in the painting—all men—capture and attack Liberty. The Enlightenment, which purportedly dispelled darkness and decreed the empire of reason, left women out. Worse still: it subdued them even more, as her piece, Rousseau y Sophie (2007), sets out to prove. In it, she reminds us of how Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contribution to education focused exclusively on male children.2 The book to which the piece alludes accompanies Emile as he grows through life; Sophie, on the other hand, only needs to be educated to be his wife. In Touch and Go (2010) it is the subjugated who are given the chance to write the story. The video shows former Merseyside factory workers who fell victim to Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal greed, now aged and well dressed. One by one, they go back to their former workplaces and throw stones at the few remaining windowpanes still in place in the buildings from which they were driven out, as production was dismantled and relocated to working class areas where oppression was as rife as it was in 19th century Britain.
Cartography—that crude expression of power that divides up land in such a cut and dried and mostly arbitrary way—also features in other pieces, many of which are organised chronologically too. Almost always they are unfinished processes, pieces that will never be completed because (and in this sense they are performative too) they look to both the past and the future of humanity. Pantone -500 +2007 (2007) is a chromatic exercise that gives visibility only to territories shaped by the Western notion of ‘state’, and, therefore, by the division of society into the powerful and the subjugated. A marker tracks the march of time—one second for each year. The changes are only colours that appear and disappear, obeying a logic based on the code devised by the New Jersey-based company some decades ago. Not everything that each change represents is revealed: wars, revolutions and death, many deaths. This cartographical investigation continued with Light Years (2009), in the form of a lightbox in a totally dark exhibition room. Here, there is no screen receiving the light of a projector; rather, it is the work that lights up the room. The marker starts at 1789 and again goes up to the present day. One by one, it indicates the countries where the right to vote has been won, applying a different code in each case: from exclusively male voting reserved only to one sector of society (generally, the white population) to universal suffrage for all those of legal age. An achievement of humanity or a worldwide imposition of European political thought? The piece leaves that tension unresolved; but it celebrates the political visibility of the citizen and leaves in the dark those states that have silenced their citizens for too long. Cartography features again in Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino (2010). Two large globes of the earth each bear the names that genitalia are popularly given in countries around the world. Again, it is the people that draw the map of the world. Every country has its own slang for penis and vulva—two words which are said much more than they are written, and which mark out a geography of the coarse or the untoward.
Cristina Lucas, Mundo Masculino y Mundo Femenino, 2010. Courtesy of the artist
Possibly the most relevant thing about Unending Lightning is the discussion it elicits around the meaning of work in art and the notion of efficiency. The piece defies the patience of any spectator. The writer of these lines naively decided to view it in its entirety when it was showcased in Madrid in 2017, unaware of how much time it would take. Such an assumption can be applied to the notion of research: What does it mean to research in art? What kind of knowledge can be gained? And how should rigorous information dovetail with viewer experience?
We know that art is one of the most effective ways of learning about history. Most of us in the West learn about Trajan’s victory, the Death of Marat and the July Revolution in high school by looking at artistic depictions of these scenes. But how can we explore something as vast as the history of the last century through a single work of art? Unending Lightning suggests a way while at the same time outlining a role for the artist, for here, we are not merely contemplating an image, but being rigorous. We do not expect an explanation, interpretation or voice, but a story based on verified facts. In the 1990s we started to witness what has become known as the ‘forensic turn’, that is, the increased relevance of the study of material evidence as a way of resisting that old maxim that says that not only is history written by the victors, but that any resistance to the abuse of power and destruction can only result in greater injustice. Eyal Weizman, who applied this maxim to architecture, said that it is possible to understand “the materiality and texture of a building as a surface upon which events get imprinted and upon which process becomes form.”3 In its over fifteen years of activity, the collective he leads—Forensic Architecture—has examined many conflicts and dissected certain specific events in order to identify the attackers of the defenceless and the violators of human rights. Victims are thus given a voice and, more importantly, perpetrators can be brought to trial and convicted thanks to evidence provided by artists. This constitutes a major turning point: the artist is no longer telling a story, but actively contributing elements to its judgment. Cristina Lucas goes a step further: departing from ‘the forensic’, she moves the debate from ostracism into the light, from oblivion to the forum in the etymological sense of the term. She builds on this logic, availing herself of a reversal mechanism that multiplies its meaning. If the forensic strategy means slowing down the succession of events and intensifying sensitivity to space, time and images, Cristina Lucas achieves this by speeding up time and systematizing the study of vast sets of data. In other words, if Weizman spends hours studying what happened in an instant (when a projectile exploded, for example), Lucas spends hours studying what happened in an entire century (when millions of projectiles were fired). It is not just a question of eliciting justice, but also of generating new dynamics of collective mourning, of reuniting the living (and, by extension, those yet to be born) with the dead, and of enabling societies to overcome conflict and reconcile themselves with the pain they have endured.
— Translated from Spanish
by Stéphanie Jennings
Ferran Barenblit, Director, MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Ferran Barenblit (b. 1968, Buenos Aires) is a museum director with extensive curatorial experience. Since 2015 he has been the Director of MACBA, where he leads the strategic plan that has taken the organization to a new era, expanded its exhibition spaces and created ambitious intellectual, academic, artistic and audience development initiatives.
Barenblit’s fields of research include: rethinking contemporary institutions under the notion of the “constituent museum”; contemporary art history, with a focus on the 1990s; the role of irony in culture; museum programming strategies; the relationship between art and popular culture – including music and the punk movement. He has a deep interest in generating an intense dialogue among the European countries, and with his native Latin America. He has generated many projects that have travelled from Barcelona/Madrid to Mexico City (MUAC – University Museum Contemporary Art) and Buenos Aires (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Fundación Proa).
His previous institutional experience includes CA2M, Madrid (Director, 2008-2015), CASM, Barcelona (Director, 2002-2008), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (Curator, 1996-2001), and The New Museum, New York (Curatorial Assistant, 1994-1996).
Cristina Lucas, Artist
Cristina Lucas is an artist who lives and works in Madrid. Her work has been included in solo shows, such as “Trading Transcendence” at MUDAM, Luxembourg; “Tod Bringendes Licht” at Kunstraum Innsbruck; “Light Years” at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Móstoles; as well as in group shows, festivals, and biennials, such as Yokohama Triennial, 12 Shanghai Biennale, Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Liverpool Biennial, X Bienal de La Habana, 28 Bienal de Sao Paolo, 10 Istanbul Biennal, among many others.
1 Edwin Honig (ed. and trans.), The Unending Lightning: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990), 15.
2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, 1762
3 Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017)