Reflection on Eminent Domain in an artistic context reveals a series of tools by which one might interpret diverse attitudes and actual proposals based on the theme.

The works making up this collection investigate the notion of blockage and the search for solutions in creative practice. By bringing the creative method into the light, we activate processes of balance between chaos and control, contrasting the decentralized group development of the collection and our role as curators.

This balance can be observed as a solidification and stratification of the discursive nature of art, which by its very intersection generates resistance. These points force opportunities for change, which combined with political and social referents work to establish ways to celebrate that which might otherwise run the risk of being abandoned. In turn, this celebration opens questions of obsolescence and memory, both of which have been amply discussed.

In weekly reviews, the curators have worked to open out proposed definitions in each artist's work and in perceived limits between different disciplines. One might say that the process is initiated in these early reflections made on each individual work - exploring the relationship between project and theme as well as collection and theme.

The collection has been organized along four fundamental lines each of which brings together a series of works. This functions as a means to appropriate and experience similar concepts to those experienced by the artists in the inclusion of their work in Eminent Domain. Our intention is that visitors propose new definitions, opening new lines of interrogation and continuing this fascinating dialogue of exploration via tags or the creation of private collections in My Dispatx.

The Persistence of Symbols

The projects we have placed under this notion investigate not only the way in which symbols can survive over time but also the way in which they can - even when obsolete - reactivate themselves in the memory, including false memory, via some transformation or potentiality.

Hospital 106, 4º 1ª by Jordi Canudas and Isabel Banal takes as its focus the displacement and eviction of objects that make up a home, including an attempt to reclassify the objects and give them new value based on their history. Juan DelGado - in Suspended Reverie - amplifies this renovation of an object's symbolic value in order to speak of place. In this case, the passing of time is a reclassifying force. Ruins are converted into spaces that propose fictions, spaces awaiting a new history to be written - as if they were natural palimpsests.

Opening a further and equally interesting point along this line, Antonio Otañon reviews the appropriation of a city in his essay, ¿Barcelona es de la gente? (Does Barcelona Belong to the People?) in which he opens more specific themes of gentrification, identity, and the transformation of symbols.

Interpretation as Resistance

The idea of identity within the theme of Eminent Domain, touched upon above, is significantly more evident in the projects which opted for a development whose base was not a given space-time. Through references to literature, these projects have been able to generate the psychological makeup of given characters.

Neil Chapman and David Stent's interpretation of Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) in Green Screen is a negotiation between the material they used in developing the project and ways to represent a character so well discussed. In My Language Overwhelms Her Text, Ellen Zweig's work of interpretation as resistance is evidenced from the way in which she began the process via questioning the act of translation and the directions it might take. Here one language is usurping another, and images overtake words with a sensation of waiting for something that will occur.

Personal Experience as Transforming Agent

Spatial awareness, constructions around the notion of landscapes and the capacity to perceive change, and the gain and loss of information are all themes that we might extract from Liquid Prairie by Erika Lincoln. Making visible these small changes in the passage of perceived time, Erika enables us to experience changes in a given landscape over a specific time period. For her part, Sarah Oppenheimer's Wholes+Holes works on the theme of perception, focusing on the movement between absence and presence in order to arrive at the physicality of the holes themselves. In this way she explores the difference between a partial vision of an object and a complete vision, touching on the ideas of blockage and disorientation.

In Retraced, Hannah Jauncey provides an aesthetic experience evoking bacterial and geological processes - and in Victima (Victim), Lashesphoto present us with an additional and strongly personal view of the theme in which it is the artist's insistence on a given discourse that most adequately places the work as a part of this collection.

A history without History

Finally, the projects we have placed under this heading bring together many of the ideas discussed above, focusing on the creation of an edited vocabulary, configured around given facts. Rather than being about presenting a new version, it is about presenting the version as if it were original.

Scott Mcleod's Turism uses its sources in a broadly explicit way, although eliding the original context. In this way, a platform of work is established in which the references are made invisible though being completely visible. Working in this way makes it possible to trick the readers and manipulate the presented information.

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The nineteen projects presented in as part of the Eminent Domain collection articulate a clear correspondence between the different threads mentioned, providing a specific and open narrative on an ever-present theme. These works do not only call into question the practice of eminent domain in the context of urban regeneration, but also in curatorial and artistic practice both within and without the institution - at the moment of entry into society.