Five Defence Towers (2025) speaks to fractured temporality, militarisation and precarity on both a physical and social scale. The work is centred around the 34-minute film The Night of Five Defence Towers, shot with a 360-degree camera and projected onto a ceiling-mounted LED screen evoking the form of a Catalan vault – an architectural element rooted in ancient Islamic building techniques.
In the film, four performers orchestrate a slow choreography, both tender and militaristically precise, joined by a fifth performer: Pagès Rabal herself. The spoken text uses Catalan, Spanish and English, offering an amalgam of linguistic histories in the Andalusian region, both of conquerors and conquered. Accompanying this display are LED-lit photographs of towers of Òdena, Manresana, Tossa, Miralles and Vilademàger, in contemporary Catalonia. For Pagès Rabal, these are architectures of containment that resonate with contemporary borders and infrastructural exclusion. Each tower is dramatised over the course of five acts, pairing a historical sequence – about a feudal skirmish, the engineering feats of the Islamic world, and colonial omissions – with reflections on nationalism, borders and rootlessness.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Claudia Pagès Rabal (b. 1990, Barcelona) is a visual artist, performer and writer based in Barcelona. In her practice, she interweaves words, bodies, music and movement, drawing from linguistics, psychoanalysis and decolonial studies. She generates visual and linguistic devices such as video installations, works on paper, books and other materials to conceptualise her projects. Pagès Rabal’s solo exhibitions include Five Defence Towers, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2025); In Practice: Claudia Pagès, Sculpture Center, New York (2024); Banditry, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2023). Her group exhibitions include Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024); Notes for an Eye Fire, MACBA, Barcelona, (2021); Active Forms: The 2018 Sharjah March Meeting, Sharjah Art Foundation (2018). Her first novel, Més de dues aigües,was published in Catalan by Empúries Narrativa in 2024.
EXHIBITED WORKS
Claudia Pagès Rabal (b. 1990)
Five Defence Towers, 2025
Five lightboxes with digital print on acrylic, aluminium, LED strip
127 × 40.5 × 10.5 cm each
A custom LED screen, iron structure, video, colour, 34 min, stereo
Ø 390 × 65 cm
Produced by Chisenhale Gallery and within the Call of “la Caixa” Foundation Support for Creation’24. Production
Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and mumok
Courtesy of the artist
