without pedestals, invisible virtual monuments that are transformed into allegories amplified by the media, that whisper to us even before being registered in the collective memory or indeed before actually being commemorated. Benjamin’s beautiful metaphor of history, ‘What has been is to be held fast, as an image flashing up in the now of its recognisability’, is more relevantly applied to these than it is to physical monuments. Projects such as Doppio Senso: SpettatoRe Osservato o Speculazione Voyeuristica, and particularly Ciudad Museo and On Translation: Die Stadt (1999–2004) are urban series, archi tectural and monumental apotheoses, huge signs and people watching, indiscrete snoopers who photograph, film, record, capture fleeting images and memories, highlighting how the obsession with media visualisation tends to transform experiences into images. Monuments (be they physical or virtual) and buildings work as places of memory, which is sometimes tragic, and yet they also promote a tourism of mem ory that enjoys the advantages of free time and becomes a mass spectacle. In the voyeuristic imaginary of the tourist, experiences mediated by images displace the in situ experiences of the traveller, absorbed by a leisure industry that combines culture, trade and entertainment, fully integrated in the productive system. Our difficulty in finding our bearings in cities is usually the result of our inability to map in our minds the position we occupy in them. In order to alleviate these shortages, tourist maps out line and consolidate itineraries, interesting locations, museums and monuments (as we increasingly discover in the information conveniently provided by any American visitor center or European tourist office), guiding visitors even when they stand by in queues. Whereas some buildings rise proudly as spec tacles in themselves, monuments, on the one hand, fall like symbols that condense the traces of a past that fades into frozen inert images and, on the other, float in a disorderly fashion in the hostile environment of museification. Perhaps the living spectacle that cities have now become demands such museum landmarks. In these projects, monuments are somehow sensitive to (although they also rebel against) the fate reserved to them by the Athens Charter, as commented by Le Corbusier,* as scattered items isolated in museum, subject to a process of museification. Unlike administered tourism, therefore, Muntadas inverts and sometimes sub164
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verts topical places of memory, triggering a typical and perhaps even inopportune memory of places. Such is the case of the work produced in Bremen, On Translation: Erinnerungsräume (places of memory) in 2004, that adopted the form of a publication modelled on a tourist guide of the city.
The staging of spectacle: Stadium I–XV Media images rock us into an accumulation of spectacles in which ‘Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation’. I shall replace Debord’s term with staging, for the allusion to the stage has imposed itself as a paradigm for a constellation of forms of be haviour, practices and discourses that transcend the field of the theatre and move away from the postulates of traditional and even modern plays, turning towards an aesthetics of action and realisation, of the performance of acts, i.e., performativity. Staging is an actor’s mise en scène, his political or social persona, that of works and actions, thinking of the effects it produces or exchanging roles so that it transforms spectators into actors. Staging attests to the decline of GraecoLatin leisure in its aristocratic and plebeian, its Christian and secularised forms that characterised sages, painters and poets, and the rise of the entertainment industry as it has been understood in America since Mark Twain and Buffalo Bill; ‘entertainment’ that uses the media, marketing and advertising to devour the use less time of delectation and the place of rest in order to work through other means, a use of time, the utmost negotium.
As is usual in Muntadas, Stadium I–XV (1989– 2011) is a living being, a long-standing project that progresses in successive versions incorpo rating new ingredients. Conceived as an instal lation of variable dimensions that simulates the miniaturised construction of a stadium, it com bines architectural elements with video screens, slide projections, sound material and photo graphic enlargements of the typical iconography of sports competitions, musical spectacles and all sorts of political and media propaganda. As Muntadas shows us in the irrefutable ex amples selected, Stadium I–XV is a fine architectural typology, geometrical in shape, that flourished in Roman colosseums and spread