This residency project stems from two images in the Pazo de Tor's permanent collection that, at different times, challenged the ways in which power was represented: Domingo Fontán's Geometric Map of Galicia (1845), the first scientific map of the Galician territory, the result of 17 years of work, carried out without an official commission and in open opposition to the control mechanisms of the Bourbon monarchy; and Théophile Steinlen's Leur Bouclier (1916), a small-format engraving showing civilians being pushed by German soldiers to be used as human shields during the First World War. It was created during the war, when Steinlen was focusing his graphic work on pacifist and satirical publications.

 

Fontán's map, hanging in one of the Pazo's main rooms, represents not only an unprecedented technical advance but also a political gesture: for the first time, Galicia was described with a precision that had never existed before, displacing the official way of understanding and thinking about the territory. Meanwhile, Steinlen's engraving, which goes unnoticed among the large religious paintings in the former games room, contains a latent brutality that concentrates the violence of war's logic on bodies, a violence that continues to be repeated in the current armed conflicts around the world.

 

The artist reinterprets both images to activate a reading protocol that shifts their historical narrative. He recovers Fontán's gesture of traversing the territory to link the manor house with the city of Monforte de Lemos, juxtaposing stately symbols with posters torn from walls and abandoned buildings. These fragments, intervened with black and white paint, reveal the erosion of a past of railway splendor and the transformation of an urban landscape now marked by decay.

 

In parallel, Steinlen's engraving is reproduced repeatedly until it forms a larger-scale display, evoking, like an echo, the persistence of power logics over bodies and spaces, resonating with the ways in which violence and control continue to operate in the present amidst new geopolitical tensions.

 

An installation that functions as a visual essay, a space for the relationship between historical images, territory, and the present. And, at the same time, as its title suggests, a reflection on how we can perform gestures that allow us to disobey the gaze and rethink how we understand images from their own perspective.