'MIES CRUISING PAVILION MONTJUIC': AN UNAUTHORISED EXHIBITION BY PABLO LEON DE LA BARRA AND FRIENDS

MIES CRUISING PAVILION MONTJUIC
An unauthorised exhibition at the Barcelona Pavilion by Pablo Leon de la Barra with Francesc Ruiz, Joan Morey, Pol Esteve & Marc Navarro, Paco y Manolo, Ricardo Fumanal and friends.
October 9, 2010, 1 PM
Mies Van der Rohe Pavilion, Montjuic, Barcelona
a project developed by invitation of Esther Planas and EME3 architecture festival









Francesc Ruiz' 'Montjuic', and Pol Esteve y Marc Navarro, 'Atlas of Plans'


Ricardo Fumanal 'Cowboys', and Barberini Faun


'Miguel' and 'Ximo' by Paco y Manolo


Alfonso XIII and Mies


Montjuic Cruising texts from squirt.org and El Pais



Joan Morey, 'Dendrofilia', 3 posters, 2010


the path to the back of the pavilion, where the exhibition was installed


PLB installing the exhibition


visitors to the exhibition!


Francesc Ruiz, 'Montjuïc', B/W xerox, original size 250 x 250 cm, 2003


Pol Esteve y Marc Navarro, 'Atlas of Plans', 2006-2008, architectonic drawings of dark rooms in Barcelona


Ricardo Fumanal, 'Cowboys', drawings


The Barberini Faun, black and white photocopy poster, suggested to be installed instead of Georg Kolbe's 'Dawn' sculpture.


Paco y Manolo, 'Ximo', colour photograph


Paco y Manolo, 'Miguel', colour photograph



Joan Morey, 'Dendrofilia', 3 posters, 2010
Dendrofilia: "love of trees". The term refers to people that are sexually attracted to, or sexually aroused by trees. This may involve sexual contact or veneration as phallic symbols or both; some humans are known to derive pleasure from the act of arboreal copulation.



Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and King Alfonso XII of Spain during the opening of the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition.



Montjuic cruising page from http://www.squirt.org/



Montjuic cruising article in El Pais



MIES CRUISING PAVILION MONTJUIC
An unauthorised exhibition by Pablo Leon de la Barra with Francesc Ruiz, Joan Morey, Pol Esteve & Marc Navarro, Paco y Manolo, Ricardo Fumanal and friends.
October 9, 2010, 1 PM
Mies Van der Rohe Pavilion, Montjuic, Barcelona

a project developed by invitation of Esther Planas and EME3 architecture festival
with special thanks to Manuel Segade, Mario Ballesteros, Matteo Colombo, David Betsue, Manu Grosso, Alex Brahim, Fito Conesa, Alex Duttmann

cruising tour of Montjuic by Paco y Manolo

public reading by Esther Planas of Guy Hocquenghem's 'The Screwball Asses' published by Semiotext(e) originally published in French in 1973

"Well, yes, I was ashamed. But I was ashamed of my shame. It is as if homosexual desire could only be inscribed where repression has inscribed it. I know how many queers only have toilets in which to touch each other. It depresses me that those who have decided to come out of hiding continue to project their excitement in the miserable places that the system condescends to allow them and where the police provoke them. Toilet spasms are like banking transactions: a flow of cum running in the shadows, as disincarnate as money, checks of cum behind the grate of a bank teller window.
I suddenly turn fascist and want to chase the queers from their tearoom with a whip. I want to throw them out of this cell where they can only revel in darkness. Strange paradox: they can desire almost any body with a dick and an ass (I wish I could), on the condition that it all happens in the shadows, that they fuck without knowing each other, that only machinic organs be involved.
Put the same people in a lit room, as we have just seen, or in a tranquil prairie (not to mention public park), and they start talking to escape desire, or they look askance at one another, eyeing the only body whith whiche they would like to be alone. The desiring machine produces crepuscular orgies or couples that close in under the light, and then shut off the electricity."

"Today's homosexual does not embody polymorphic desire: he moves univocally beneath an equivocal mask. His sexual objects have already been chosen by social or political machination, and they are always the same: either weaker or stronger, older or younger, more in love with him or he more in love with them, more bourgeois or more proletarian, primitive or intellectualized, uber-male or sub-male, black or white, Arab or Viking, top or bottom, and so forth. Politics has already done its underground work."

"For them, the revolution consisted in freeing and making official those places reserved for homosexual desire. It meant creating thousands of tearooms and millions of gigolos reimbursed by social security, rather than starting the revolution by publicly announcing the object of your desire, and asking in public who desires you.
Clandestine practices create addictions..."

"What I like, myself, is to desire all bodies that can produce joy and revolution."










"The path he follows (the visitor) will lead him through landscapes of infinite depth - the veins of the stone, together with the reflections; the transparency of the glass, together with the reflections - in which any and all references to an origin or to a structural order have disappeared. Even the quartering of the sheets of stone, whose veins form a pattern of double symmetry and whose slanted lines join together to form a rhomboidal shape, makes the walls into a kaleidoscopic game, a mirror image of itself. And the mysteries of glass have other consequences. They confound the senses of the wandering visitor, lost in a forest of intertwined images'..."

"A labyrinth supposes a continuous, uniform space; disorientation in such a space is tantamount to indecision whether to go to the right or to the left, forwards or backwards. In a labyrinth, every path should seem worth going down. Each has the same value. There's no way of choosing one over the rest. In fact, the patterned regularity of a labyrinth is such that there is no way of knowing where one is. Thus, in a labyrinth there is not forward or backward, nor left or right' there is only the fact of walking onwards without knowing where one is going, without a path. The reflections in the pavilion are something quite different. An unstoppable flow of osmosis enables the mirrors to seemingly suck in any and all figures that should appear before them. The more crowded the mirror becomes, with its spectacular but impassable landscape, the emptier the room standing before it will become. 'You mirrors, who go on emptying the empty rooms,' Rilke said of mirrors. Mirrors do away with rooms; they empty and wither the places from which we gaze at them; they shift all interest to the other side of the looking -glass' they point desire, with uncontrollable force in a direction which one can never follow: into the mirror..."

" 'The Palace of Reflections', 'mysterious glass', 'what you see on the other side of the glass and what you see reflected on its surface seem to blend together': the pavilion is not made of stone, glass, stucco, and iron, but of reflections. And consequently, as floors walls, pillars, and ceilings are not built of reflections, the pavilion is made of virtual landscapes, of impassable paths. Only mirrors can be made of reflections..."

from Josep Quetglas, 'Fear of Glass: Mies van der Rohe's pavilion in Barcelona', Actar, Barcelona, 2001

for a guide of where to cruise in Montjuic (apart from Mies pavilion!) visit this link.