Domino Canibal

Held at a single venue over a 12-month period (Jan-Dec 2010), Domino Canibal project in Spain allowed successive artists to create original works by reinterpreting, demolishing, appropriating, and canibalising the work of preceding artists. This title offers an overview of the project.

Dominó Canibal is proposed as a counter-model to the usual types of artistic participation. It presents itself as a platform made up of overlaps and discontinuities between various artists, who engage with one another successively and in stages in the same space, cannibalising (reinterpreting, demolishing and appropriating) the work of the other participants.The relationship between dominoes and cannibalism is not as gratuitous as it may seem. On the one hand, the Manifiesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto), written in 1928 by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, suggested cannibalism as a metaphor for rebellion against the myths of originality and cultural identity. And on the other hand, the game of dominoes is itself the product of the successive cannibalisation of its components: it is a truly trans-cultural object. Based on Chinese dice games, and taken, like pasta, to Italy, it ended up spreading with the Iberian colonization of the new world and become the most popular table game in Latin American societies.The aim of Dominó Caníbal is to bring together all this imagery by inviting a group of artists - Jimmie Durham, Cristina Lucas, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Tania Bruguera and Francis Alÿs among others - to act in a space established not in terms of autonomy and individual identity but rather as a venue for ongoing negotiation between languages, materials and aesthetics.