"No one ever explains the loser's side of the story"

-"Those of us who are a bit critical are the rara avis"
-"We live in a society in which the only ideology is consumerism"
-"I believe in young people; they have many more abilities than the young people from the 1970s and 1980s"

Francesc Abad (Terrassa, 1944) was one of the pioneers of conceptual art in the 1970s, while he also experimented with body art and land art. He was a founding member of Grup de Treball, one of the most important group of conceptual artists in all of Spain. He studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Terrassa and at the Documentation Centre of Paris. In 1972 he moved to New York. He later returned to Catalonia and spent 40 years as a teacher at Aula, a secondary school centre in Barcelona. Ten year ago he created the artistic project which is now being exhibited at the UAB, and which won him the Barcelona City Award in Plastic Arts.
 
The artistic project "El Camp de la Bota" gives voice to relatives of the 1,700 people executed during the Spanish Civil War in the Camp de la Bota area of Barcelona (currently the Forum area). Ten completely different exhibits were created, because relatives were contacted in each of the ten cities visited. Some 200 people were interviewed and over 50 videos were recorded. A total of three years of work, with a team formed by historians which resulted in an impressive task of recovering historical memory. The exhibit at the UAB displays people from the Vallès region, from Terrassa and Mollet del Vallès.

-Why is recovering our historical memory useful? What is the objective of this artistic project?

In a country like ours in which many things have been denied, a project like this is essential. This project is the first of its kind to be made ten years ago with the aim of recovering the voice of those who suffered the consequences. And this wasn't done by a historian, it was done by an artist, and in a key moment, in 2004, coinciding with the fiasco that was the Universal Forum of Cultures. I work a lot with my own biographical memory, the memory of worlds which are disappearing, the memory of losers, which is what nobody wants to explain.
 
 -What message do you want to send out to the students, the young people who will come to see your exhibit at the UAB?
 
I don't give messages, I'm just an artist. But if you work with a bit of a critical spirit, you need to know where you live and where you come from. Without a past, there's no future. One of Walter Benjamin's concepts focuses on the "interruption of time", to be able to rethink what we are doing. That's what happens with “El Camp de la Bota”: it is the moment to think of a past which is future, because this past was not closed. The injustices perpetrated at that time still live on today. If there is a political party such as the right-wing Partido Popular which is now governing, with fascist policies, people need to know where this fascism comes from, from Franco's dictatorship. Yes, young people need to see that.
 
-You were one of the first to defend conceptual art in Catalonia in the 1970s. Is this type of art still valid in a world filled with multimedia?
Of course it is! There is life outside multimedia. There are many things going on which do not appear in the media. We live in a very conservative and conformist society, and that's very scary. Those of us who are a bit critical are the rara avis. We've created a world of people reading self-help books and cops and robbers which does not interest me at all. It's all fiction. What I deal with is not fiction, it's reality, the thing is that people need to know this. The media depends completely on who pays and who rules.
 
-But does one go against the other?
No, not at all. Many young people are following in our paths and they are very valuable artistically, but they are not seen in the media. Here at the UAB there are many people who stand out like Teresa Camps, Gerard Vilar and Jessica Jacques, people who work to promote contemporary art. The university for me has been to some extent a focal point of freedom. And this is what many people who are outside of the industry also feel.
 
-How are the technologies affecting people who create art?
-They help us enormously. For example, I have no formal artistic studies and they help me a lot. My studies are in the clouds. We are not craftsmen, we do not do sculptures or paintings. Our work is based on ideas. The final result is not what interests us, what we focus on is the process, the journey is the work of art. Therefore, projects like these which take years to complete and in which we have a team working on it, as a network, technologies help us greatly.
 
-Is the economic crisis affecting art and culture? In what ways?
Yes, but not only now. Contemporary art has always suffered, we've never received money. Exhibits can be prepared with very little money because you only need a place to exhibit, but these are becoming scarcer and that's a problem. In Catalonia, we have an infrastructure able to give support to the work we do; but Barcelona capital and the larger cities have a very tight agenda and there is no room for us. There's a series of people, myself included, who cannot express themselves in Barcelona, because we work outside the industry, since it requires you to create things that can be sold and other conditions we cannot meet.
 
I began working with museums fairly recently. Some of my works are in the Macba museum in Barcelona and the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, but that's it, and everything is through donations. My work focuses more on artistic research, R&D, and moves away from the art that the industry demands.
 
-You taught for 40 years in the secondary school Aula in Barcelona, when you returned from the United States. Today's educational model seems to be going in a direction in which the humanities are relegated to a lower level. What are your feelings about this? How can this affect the overall development of a person?

-As the philosopher said "without imagination or the ability to create things, we're lost". Humanism is as important as sciences. The education system is designed to steer people in the direction needed so that they end up in specific industries. Humanism leads to a uselessness, and I think that uselessness is exactly what makes it productive: it makes you capable of thinking for yourself. Humanism is being driven away from the classroom because it offers nothing. Baumann used to say that a man costs more than what he produces. But I believe there are other things in the world apart from producing. We cannot reach these extremes. Progress is sometimes a retrogression and it takes you back years, as Benjamin said, and a large part of society ends up in a ditch.
 
-At 70, you've lived a full life and worked many years as a secondary school teacher. What opinion do you now have of the young people surrounding you?
-I think young people are the future. I am optimistic and continue to think that they have many possibilities. The ability for young people now to get far are countless, compared to the 1970s and 1980s. We must have confidence in young people, a lot of confidence.
 
-It is said that today's young people are more conformist and spoilt.
-It's not just young people, it's society as a whole! It's a shapeless society, you hit it and it doesn't react. A society which needs to rebel itself in some form, but since consumerism is the only ideology it's left with, there's nothing more! Rebel against the ideology of consumerism, which our leaders have imposed on us, is very difficult.