Barracão 1936-1939. Chekas. Cells in the Convent of Santa Úrsula, Valencia. A cheka belonging to DEDIDE (Special State Information Department) in Valencia, under Minister Galarza. Punishment cells without prisoners. Photo reproduced in ‘Causa General sobre La dominación Roja de España’, 1941. Region of Valencia section. Pieces no. 11. Annexe VII. Photo no. 9. Ministry of Culture. FC-1068. Spain. Exp. 5. Regional Archive of Valencia. Contemporary History Section. National Historical Archive. Madrid. Photo: SIM. 1967-1970. Barracão [Shack]. Ninhos in Sussex University Experience. FUNARTE (National Arts Foundation) rooms. SUE catalogue. Sussex University. England. Ninhos used by students and spectators. In ‘Information’, MOMA, New York. 1970. Photo reproduced in the catalogue Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Special Room at 9th National Plastic Arts Salon. Paço Imperial. November-December, 1986. Rio de Janeiro. MAC-USP. November-December 1987. Sao Paulo. Brazil. Photo: John Goldblatt.
The attitude of Alphonse in Valencia speaks more of his experience in the street, the savviness of a survivor, as we have seen up until now. Given the need to lend his experiments a conventional mantle, he agreed to collaborate with officials from SIM (Military Information Service) and DEDIDE (Special State Information Department). It seems that in the group there were other agents from FINE ARTS IN MADRID and from the more informal detention centres in MURCIA and ALMERÍA. The first meeting was actually more of a party as it coincided with the anniversary of the Polish couple Peter and Berta SONIN. In the cells at SANTA ÚRSULA, a stage was improvised for performances of theatre and music, featuring an odd bunch of prisoners and jailers. At a certain moment, LAURENCIC captured the profoundly theatrical sense of installations. What have so often been presented as avant-garde and social control experiments by modern police forces were no more than representations of something much older, something harking back to inquisitorial punishments and of the black legend that hovered over buildings like SANTA ÚRSULA, now converted into a SIM prison. At the end of the day, the sensorial experiences were similar in one era and the other, as the aim of ‘making-them-speak’ of the times of the GRAND INQUISITOR was also its ultimate goal. To this end the players had to create a suitable stage setting. What LAURENCIC did was to transfer what he had learned from the BAUHAUS to the modern space the exact same ideas and sensations that come from a much older time. And not only the gothic experiences of torture, but also the visions of our mystics are reflected in LAURENCIC’s parodical language. The awareness that human experiences of pleasure and suffering are very close to each other was possessed by both mystics and police chiefs. To a certain extent, the place that LAURENCIC was going to create is an experimental space, utopian in the same sense as the communist ideology that protected it, a place that unquestionably would not have existed before as such. This feeling was what surely convinced the SONINS and that enabled them to keep going and to take their experiences of calle ZARAGOZA as well as calle VALLMAJOR, to BARCELONA. LAURENCIC saved his life, without a doubt, and the war years, which he spent in prison, were probably the quietest of his ill-fated life. Limitations on area no longer exist. The urban environment has come to be recognised ‘as experimentally closer to us when it is something we want to experience day after day: mutable and subject to violent transformations.’ It was to these propositions for the collective experimentation of other, familiar sources, which Hélio gave contemporary configurations. Written on July 22, 1973, the date of José Oiticica’s birthday: ‘My grandfather had a dream; to transform/to live in a house that would be a THEATRE OF MUSICAL PERFORMANCE: it doesn’t matter: lots of people already lived the LIFE-THEATER DREAM which actually is like a THEATER-HOUSE, the interchange of stage-audience-performance day-in, day-out: so close yet so far from what I want: SHELTER/SHACK/ENVIRONMENTALMANIFESTATIONS/BABYLONEST _ but isn’t SHELTER-PERFORMANCE so close to my grandfather’s old dream? And so far?’ His grandfather developed plans of creating anarchist communities, and not just an isolated theatre-house, an oasis within the establishment. They were heterotopias, but within a utopia, awaiting ideal conditions. Hélio, in turn, when he came to consider the world a playground, overcame the need to construct a Shack or a series of closed, localised cells, expanding them to the chance of the streets and everyday experiences, while directing the heterotopic opposition to focal points of transitory location. Portable heterotopias? In the world turned shelter, the idea now is to carry this oasis through the desert, rather than taking refuge in an oasis, and displacing the desert nomads. In this way, he distances himself from his grandfather’s dream, since it’s not a utopia, but something that can be realised with every footstep.
Archivo F.X. / Pedro G. Romero, file Barracão, 2014 [Shack] 195