Desaparicions II, 2005

Desaparicions II (2005) takes its title from the famous novel by the writer Georges Perec, La disparition (1969), which, throughout its three-hundred pages, avoids using any word with an ‘e’, the most frequently used letter in the French language. Inspired by the book, Ignasi Aballí created a display of twenty-four movie posters with the titles of Perec's screenplays, a little-known aspect of the writer’s career. Some were actually produced, while the majority did not reach the screen, although the artist does not reveal which are which. If the cinema poster always refers to something else – to the film –, in this case it remains an orphan, testifying to an absence. On the  other hand, the images Aballí uses in the posters all allude to disappearances, such as a book without text, a fallen poster, a blank screen or a jigsaw puzzle without an image. Resonating through this sum of disappearances evoked by the work is the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust, since the surname Perec (which only has the vowel ‘e’) was the French version of a Yiddish surname, a strategy adopted by the writer's family to protect themselves from the Nazis. There are no vowels in the original surname, since the Hebrew alphabet contains only consonants.