Pedro G. Romero

(Huelva, 1964)

Experimental artist, researcher, curator and editor, in his work he uses photography, audiovisual techniques and documentation systems to question the meaning and veracity of the image and other aesthetic and sociocultural foundations. The themes that structure his work are historical events, life and the circulation of images, sacramental iconography, the iconoclastic gesture of the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century and modern art, flamenco, concepts and imaginaries about popular cultures, economy, cultural policies, forms of urban speculation, etc. His reflection focuses on the use and ideological administration of images. He develops his work from two projects, the FX Archive and the PH Machine. The FX Archive is a double registration facility: documentary consultation and photographic exhibition. The archive's collection is made up of images and documents of iconoclastic actions of anticlerical politics carried out in Spain from 1845 to 1945. This material is recategorized by registering it with indexes taken from the onomastics of the avant-garde. It is a conceptual, “processual” art proposal in which the will to power of the religious image is opposed to the devastating combative effect of iconoclasm and, likewise, to the erosive action and physical, sentimental and critical nuance that the passage of time makes it easier. Added to the dialectical interest is the aesthetic value implicit in the new or modern beauty of ruins and fragmentation. Taking flamenco as a starting point with the PH Machine through which it promotes the Independent Platform of Modern and Contemporary Flamenco Studies (PIE.FMC) whose main objective is to expand the field of study of flamenco with tools from aesthetics, history of art, visual studies and new considerations that come from cultural studies to anthropology and sociology. In relation to the imaginaries of flamenco and popular culture, he has promoted projects on a European scale, as a way-of-life, on the work of art in flamenco, gypsies and Roma for the Bergen Assembly in Norway and the Kunstverein in Stuttgart. He co-directs the collection “Flamenco and popular culture” for the Athenaica publishing house. He was curator/curator of the Peace Treaty project for the DSS2016 Cultural Capital. Works on the Living Machines project. Flamenco and architecture in the occupation and vacancy of spaces, which has been presented at the Berlin Biennial, the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela and UNIA arte y vivir in Seville.