Following previous interventions by Ai Weiwei, SANAA and Jeff Wall, the Mies Van der Rohe Foundation and the Fundació Banc Sabadell presented on December 13th until February 28th the intervention ‘PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society’ by Andrés Jaque & the Office for Political Innovation, an installation based on the two year ethnographical work developed by Jaque and the Office.
‘PHANTOM’ account the existence of a basement below the icon of Modern Movement, in which all those ordinary objects necessary to construct the upper floor’s sublime experience are kept away from public sight. As Dorian Gray’s portrait, the basement is the place where the pacts in which the upper floor gets to be constructed as a social reality are retained. In Jaque’s words: ‘The pavilion is a two stories battle ground where two notions of the politics confront. The foundational politics on the upper floor, the contingent in the basement’. The installation proposes a new way to articulate them through 23 social contracts between the ordinary and the sublime materially displayed in the very place where Mies ecstasies has been traditionally found.