Inhabiting the skin of another: Lilly Reich and the Barcelona Pavilion

This article explores the political ramifications of Laura Martínez de Guereñu’s artistic intervention Re-enactment, that occupied the Barcelona Pavilion March-July 2020. I analyse the work’s feminist methodology, and in respect of this the remarkable way in which Martínez de Guereñu’s Re-enactment conjoined archival research and artistic/architectural practice to draw visitors into an experiential rumination on the missing presence of Lilly Reich within the Pavilion’s canonical historiography – an occlusion that persists in spite of the fact the Pavilion’s design and construction is now co-credited to Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Pivotal to my discussion is an analysis of the political import of Martínez de Guereñu’s decision to intervene in the actual built fabric of the Pavilion. I explore the way in which her removal of the Pavilion’s central double-faced glass wall - which exposed a void normally hidden within - gave architectural form, through a process of excavation, to the work’s overarching conceptual preoccupation with gaps and blind spots within the Pavilion’s historiography and the inequalities that such canonical omissions enfold. I go on to discuss the wider political significance of Martínez de Guereñu’s research into Reich’s life and work and her re-enactment of this within the present moment. With reference to Verónica Zebadúa Yáñez’s analysis of biography as political theory, I posit that such methodologies, as exemplified by this work, have the political potential to open on to an idea of agency as plural, interdependent and situated. Re-enactment’s architectural embodiment of this idea of agency whereby the architecture itself became an active and reciprocal agent is seen to call forth architecture’s wider potential to challenge cultural norms and their inherent inequalities.

The article is accompanied by a series of film stills from my film 'Lieu de passage' 2020 made in response to Re-enactment.