Solo presentation at Liste 2026 with 243 Luz & Co
‘What happened or that which is said to have happened’
is both the title of the work and a quote from Trouillot’s book Silencing the past : power and the
production of history where he discusses the latin distinction between res gesta and rerum
gestatum, the event itself and it’s deciphering. In this book, Trouillot writes about the
mechanisms of the production of history and its silences, using the context of the Haitian
Revolution of 1791 as the subject of study.
The installation is thought of as a « historical » diorama [diorama meaning to see through] that
reconstructs the space in which the performative act of re-hanging the Guernica tapestry, after
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (a reproduction of the original painting), occurred at UN Headquarters
three years ago, in 2022, after it was removed for “curatorial purposes” for multiple years.
A lengthy video of 24 minutes on the UN YouTube page documents the process of re-installing
the work, therefore presenting it as some sort of historical moment.
The mediatization of this moment happens decades after the first ‘Guernica scandal’ when the
tapestry was covered with a blue drape shortly before the U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The motive for this gesture was uncertain and various theories were spread questioning wether it
was due to the scandalous nature of having Collin Powell, then Secretary of State in the U.S,
announcing the invasion of Iraq in front of the most famously known war painting or simply for
the sake of journalists being able to shot with a simpler, plain backdrop.
Working from the various extracted frames of the video, the diorama offers a singular viewpoint
of the ‘set’ where the action takes place. The diorama re-stage, not the space itself but the
performative moment in space as presented in the video. In other words a re-staging of a staged
action. The aesthetic and photographic nature of the diorama poses as a singular ‘objective’
viewpoint of a space, it ‘freezes’ a moment, therefore encapsulating a multitude of viewpoints,
what is shown and what is not, and the multiple narratives contained within.
The installation interrogates on one hand the nature of this performative action, the context and
the meaning it tries to generate. Its format, a decor, is a sort of ‘toyification’ of a
moment which highlights the inherently theatrical nature inextricably linked to the medium of the
film, its newsworthiness, and its surreptitious implications.
The cabinet presents a set of artefacts extracted from the scene: the same gloves used by the
art handlers, a black shirt similar to the one they wear, an image of the painting hung that
appears in the video to be looked at as a reference of where to hang the tapestry, a dollar coin
and two fabricated documents. The documents, which are inspired by meeting minutes, aren’t a
transcript but rather a summary of the event and the agents taking part in the scene, describing
what was said and done. Merging different timelines and textual materials from UN digital archive
meetings, newspaper articles and also my own fabricated narrative, this textual collage
questions accuracy in the making of evidence. Thus presented, the work echoes the dynamics
generated by museography in its attempt to claim to produce a neutral viewpoint.
In addition to the diorama and installation is a series of analog prints made from photographs taken using objects and research materials surrounding the body of work.
The photographs present an additional set of viewpoints on the subject through varying (out of focus) foci. The selection emphasises the decision making process inherent to the medium, particularly to the idea of framing, of what’s left in and what’s left out of an image.
The intentionally narrow view of the photographs questions the act of choosing equally inherent to historians, archivists, journalists, and mass media producers. The decision of what stays in focus and what falls to the edges is parallel to the decisions of who is left inside or outside of history, of an economic system, who has access to resources and functional institutions, who has rights, and ultimately who lives and who dies.
Installation view of What happened or that which is said to have happened, 2026
photography by Julian Blum
Some of the analog prints from the photographic serie part of the body of work