Claudia Pagès Rabal on Language, Law and Water
From medieval cisterns to Mediterranean trade, the artist uncovers the past through evocative text, immersive sound and dynamic choreography
From medieval cisterns to Mediterranean trade, the artist uncovers the past through evocative text, immersive sound and dynamic choreography
Kyle Dancewicz We first met in 2021 when your exhibition ‘dis-des-duress. tris-tras, giro, fallo’ was on view at àngels barcelona. The show featured a body of work exploring the effects of globalization through the circulation of goods.
Claudia Pagès Rabal That exhibition included my film Puerto & Court: Gerundio (2021), which played on my first 360-degree screen suspended from the ceiling. Made when I was still living in Amsterdam, and filmed between The Netherlands’ Maritime Justice Court and Rotterdam Harbour, it shows me dancing by the docks as a police ship passes shooting water in the air. The film also includes poems that seek to unpack why, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I became obsessed with visiting the harbour: I was investigating the violent linguistics of legalese and how particular forms of language, such as the gerund, are used within the justice system. The work was a playful way of weaving both these elements together.
When I moved back to Barcelona, I recorded Gerundi circular (2021), shooting it at the customs agency, the World Trade Center and the breakwater that triangulates its port. This experience further piqued my interest in tracing the language of violence, which in turn led me to investigate the histories of the Silk Road and Mediterranean trade routes.
KD The Silk Road seems to serve as a framework for many of your exhibitions.
CPR I initially became interested in it because I grew up in the Catalonian town of Capellades, where paper-making was one of the main industries. In fact, as a child, I would watch my mother, who is a papermaker, make her own paper by hand, so I was always aware of its historical significance, and how papermaking was introduced to Europe by adopting techniques gleaned on the Silk Road. Papermaking requires large supplies of fresh water and, initially, I was interested in looking at watermarks not only as proprietary images or text but also as signifiers of the movements of various bodies of water. This, in turn, led me further down the Iberian Peninsula to the town of Xàtiva, south of Valencia, which was the first place in Europe where paper was introduced. There, I visited an 11th century Moorish cistern used to collect water for the papermaking process. The video installation Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe [2024], first exhibited at SculptureCenter in New York, documents that experience. It is shown in a hand-made LED sculpture in the shape of a book, playing with the idea of the surface as text, wall and screen.
The link between water and law unsettled me.
As in a slightly later work, Aljubs i Grups [Cisterns and Groups, 2024], made for Manifesta 15 and co-produced with Index, Stockholm, I set out to ‘map’ the watermarks, but instead uncovered a different kind of signifier: inscriptions and graffiti in the cisterns. Embedded in the walls and etched into the surface, these marks spoke of a past shaped by violent settler histories within what is now Spain.
KD What was it like exploring these medieval cisterns?
CPR When I entered the cistern in Xàtiva to make Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe, I had no idea what I would find. I managed to get inside and, once I was underground, I realized its true depth. This was a place that had once supplied water to an Islamic palace, which was later destroyed to build a convent; now, it’s in the grounds of a luxury hotel.
For Aljubs i Grups, I wanted to return to that space but bring with me performers, other collaborators and new texts. I also wanted to work with a number of different locations nearby because there isn’t just one water cistern: there are many. One, which has dried out now, is a place where teenagers go to hang out, smoke joints and do their own graffiti. I wanted to create a parallel between these two spaces.
KD One of the characters in Aljubs i Grups says words to the effect of: ‘I’m not interested in the castle; I’m interested in the cistern.’
CPR I wrote the text for Aljubs i Grups as a fully scripted dialogue. At the time, I had just published my first novel, Més de dues aigües (More than Two Waters, 2024), which contained almost no dialogue, and I was curious to see if I was capable of writing a dialogue-only narrative. That concern drove me to prepare a script for the piece, structuring it as a conversation between two people who don’t actually connect. At the time, I was reading Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile [1958], a novella that builds its entire story through dialogue, and her approach influenced my thinking.
KD Sometimes, you appear alongside a few collaborators in your performance videos, but there’s an intentional ambiguity as to who they are or what their roles might be. Are they researchers, trespassers, explorers or simply friends moving through space? What do these interactions between people and place help you to understand or reveal?
CPR For each piece, I try out different forms of collaborations, always with scripts that I’ve written, which I work on with different performers. In Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe, it was just me, alone, in a wetsuit. I didn’t initially plan for that footage to become the final video: I just went in to test things out. But, once I was in there, I really leaned into this fantasy whereby I was navigating the cistern as though I was in Tomb Raider [2001–08]. Some people asked me if the cisterns might have been queer spaces, but I didn’t read them that way at all.
KD No gaydar in the cistern.
CPR Exactly. Later, I edited the video to include three voices, evoking the experience of playing a video game – with a player, a narrator and a friend helping you find the way out of the cistern. The voices belong to Yahya Albarrawi, a friend from Gaza; the Barcelona-based musician and producer nara is neus, with whom I’ve collaborated for several years; and myself.
With Aljubs i Grups, I wanted to build a dialogue – one side textual, the other musical – so I worked with Xeno Bitch, a Barcelona-based rapper, not to rap in the traditional sense, but to play with spoken word and rhythm. I wanted to collaborate with someone who understood melody and timing but could break away from rhyme; someone who could improvise and stretch the text into music in an unconventional way.
I really leaned into this fantasy whereby I was navigating the cistern as though I was in Tomb Raider.
Then I brought in three dancers wearing bodycams to explore multiple subjectivities. Their choreography became a way of filming, creating a collective recording from their tight yet fluid group. It was also a way to explore choreography as a multi-perspective language.
KD What did you make of the language you encountered in the cisterns?
CPR The graffiti in the water cistern spans several centuries, from the 16th to the 19th. By the end, it’s quite absurd: just drawings of penises with names written inside them. But there are also two legal contracts recording the sale of the property carved into the under-water walls. I found it fascinating that there’s legality embedded within the absurdity of the penises.
KD That ties into something I’ve heard you refer to previously as ‘the two streams’, which is to say visible facts and submerged narratives.
CPR Yes. One stream is the official timeline: dates, data, historical markers. The other is myth or misinformation: stories that spread and circulate alongside or against those facts. Together, they form the logic of imperial and colonial power. The link between water and law unsettled me, as did this evidence of how settler time works in superposition, marking the walls again and again.
During the pandemic, I was stuck in a legal altercation with an institution and it really disturbed me. I’d go to the harbour in Rotterdam to clear my head, to try and write something – fiction, maybe – but I couldn’t. The legal language I was drowning in was too dehumanizing, too vast in scale. It made me feel erased, fearful. That’s where my fear of ‘gerund’ language began – a verb tense that eliminates the subject and turns the verb into a noun without number, gender or time – a constant ‘in process’ state. I wrote a book about these journeys called Gerund Violence, which will be published by Wendy’s Subway later this year. Now, as a writer, when I think about texts that need to be spoken, I shift into a musical mode and start to imagine them as operettas. Then, I edit them to become fully auditory. Mine is a sound-based writing practice.
KD You live in Barcelona. Do you think location has an influence on your work?
CPR Living on the Iberian Peninsula, it’s important for me to understand how the Mediterranean is fragmented: how racism begins, how it’s maintained, what strategies are used. The work isn’t just about specific sites, it’s about how history lingers in the present, how violence persists and why people identify with it.
KD Barcelona is in a unique position, being both autonomous yet deeply entangled with Spain and Europe.
CPR Yes, Barcelona – and Catalonia more broadly – has a kind of conflicting relationship with Spain. There’s a progressive, anti-imperialist energy rooted in resistance to Spanish colonial history. Spain, after all, is built on ethnic cleansing. But Catalonia also profited from empire – Cuban and Puerto Rican colonies funded Barcelona’s bourgeoisie and factories – so it has its own colonial legacy, too.
Barcelona wants to be seen as a Mediterranean capital but it turns to Europe for validation, especially during political conflict. It’s a complex city: against Spain, complicit with empire and seeking European refuge – all while connected to broader Mediterranean histories.
KD Your recent installation at London’s Chisenhale Gallery, Five Defence Towers [2025], takes a very theatrical approach to the regional history of the Reconquista –especially in comparison to your more guerrilla-style videos. It’s set in a black box theatre, with performers taking on visible, distinct roles. Can you give a brief overview of the work and its structure?
CPR It’s a performance for camera, recorded in a Barcelona theatre and shown on a handmade, dome-shaped screen. It comprises five fable-like scenes, each of which is inspired by one of five medieval defence towers that formerly designated the border between the Muslim-ruled Al-Andalus region of the Iberian Peninsula and the Carolingian forces from the north. The Carolingians brought settlers and offered them land and money to take over the area. It’s a strategy still used today – move in settlers, destabilize, expand. In these kinds of ‘buffer zones’ the land area stays the same, but the control shifts.
It’s important to understand how the Mediterranean is fragmented: how racism begins, how it’s maintained, what strategies are used.
Today, the towers are lit up at night in garish orange and red, and no one actually visits them; they’ve been aestheticized into invisibility. I didn’t want to film on site, so I photographed the towers at night, working with long exposures to capture what wouldn’t ordinarily be visible in the dark.
Five Defence Towers opens with a reference to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot [1953] – in which one character struggles to remove her boot – setting a tone of absurdity and repetition. Filming in a black box gave me control over the lighting and the performance, and I wanted to shift away from using the camera as a bodily extension. Here, we mounted it on a motorized fishing line, allowing it to rise, fall and rotate – as if filming from the different perspectives of a tower.
KD In contrast to some of your other work about mobility, Five Defence Towers feels to be more about impasse – in the vignettes, the speakers are often stuck outside of the towers. And in Gerundi circular [2021] – the 360-degree video you mentioned earlier – you examine global circulation and maritime routes, but one character declares: ‘I’m the King of Immobility.’
CPR That’s a reference to Albert Camus’s State of Siege [1948] – an allegory where Camus directly pointed towards the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco – in which the government refuses to acknowledge an impending plague, insisting everything should remain unchanged: the poor stay poor, the rich stay rich. When the plague arrives, they declare: ‘Now, a new form of immobility begins.’
That moment really stayed with me. In Gerundi circular, we chant ‘I’m the King of Immobility’ like in a pop song. There’s humour in the work, but it’s also a commentary on legal and political stagnation. It’s the feeling of being moored: like boats anchored in a port with their engines still running.
This article first appeared in frieze issue 252 with the headline ‘Claudia Pagès Rabal’
Main image: Claudia Pagès Rabal, Gerundi Circular (detail), 2021, video still. Courtesy: the artist and MACBA, Barcelona
