War Correspondent Archive

Arts Santa Mónica, Barcelona, between December 2012 and April 2013

The challenge of this exhibition was to explain what a conflict is, raise awareness about journalism as a literary genre and review the principal conflicts of the last 20 years. All of this through the peculiar work of the war reporter Plàcid Garcia-Planas Marcet (Sabadell, 1962), which consisted in collecting objects from the battle field and building articles around them that were published in La Vanguardia.

The content of every exhibition is conditioned by the continent, a journey, enlightenment and discourse. In this case, we were looking for an architecture that came as close as possible to the content/continent symbiosis. To do this, the contents were separated thematically in nine sections, separated by white fabrics from the journalist’s family factory, creating a set of shadows and transparencies that, with adequate illumination, created an unreal space, suspended in time, and at the same time, sterile.

The journey, back and forth, is accompanied by textual explanations on the wall, quotes from the author / owner of the archive, and projections from the period.

The main objective was to eliminate the distance between the object and the viewer – anti-museum- through touch and the parallels with laboratory work. Each object was hung from the ceiling by a long, nylon thread, wrapped in transparent plastic and accompanied by a label with a technical and contextual explanation. It creates an intimate distance with the viewer, replicating a process as familiar and quotidian as touching objects on the shelf of a store and examining their labels.

It’s an assembly that is easily itinerant and adaptable to other spaces, with unusually low material costs.