​INOCENTADA: inocentes, inocentes

 28/12/2024
Palacio de las Cortes / Palace of the Parliament, Madrid (Spain)

The title for this site and time specific ritual action is difficult to fully translate into English. The 28th December is celebrated in Spain as the Día de los Santos Inocentes (The Day of the Holy Innocents), which marks the Biblical slaughter of young children as ordered by Herod I the Great in his attempt to eradicate the threat he saw in the recently born Jesus of Nazareth (Gospel of Mattew 2, 16-18). The murdered children are seen by many as the first Christian martyrs. On this day it is a popular custom in Spain and Latin America for people to play jokes and pranks on each other in a similar way to April Fool's Day in Anglo-Saxon countries. A joke or prank of this kind is known as an inocentada, which is made up of the morpheme inocent- and the suffix -ada  denoting abundance or excess. Therefore the tittle roughly means something like 'April Fool's prank: innocents, innocents'.

The action involved black sand (which I had collected many years ago from a beach on the south coast of Tenerife) and snail shells completely bleached white by the sun (collected more recently in Alicante). I chose this specific site because the Palace of the Parliament is home to the Congreso de los Diputados, the lower house of the Spanish parliament. 
      In creating the piece, I was interested in setting up a number of different tensions and juxtapositions. From a visual point of view: the tension between the black sand and and the white snails - colours which allude to the antagonistic polarisation within politics and society - placed on the grey stone pavement. From a material point of view: the tension between the hardness of the granite floor and the fragility of the snails. From a temporal point of view: the assumed permanence and stability of the Spanish Congress as a democratic institution against the fleeting and evanescent nature of the performance, emphasised by the brevity of its main action (stepping on the snails). From a tonal point of view: the tension between the solemnity of the proceedings and the absurdity of the task. From a semiotic/poetic point of view: the tension between the snails as 'low' and 'poor' objects and the Spanish Congress as one of the key seats of state power. And from the point of view of political acts and their visibility: the tension between the smallness of my action, and large-scale protests such as Extinction Rebellion's (see 6th April 2022).

The video below is divided into sections/chapters, and has English/Spanish subtitles available during the conversation with the policeman [CC icon].

Documentation by R. M. Giner