Participation Tower - 2

As part of the series Man and the City (El Hombre y La Ciudad), which questioned the deviation taken by consumer life and the loneliness and fast pace of the metropolis, Juana Francés created Participation Tower (Torre Participación). This was a painting installation conceived as a large-scale block with a rectangular shape and an exempt character, conjuring urban residential cabin-like buildings which gave shelter while also isolating their inhabitants, who in this case were homunculi created by the painter shown within the solitude of these spaces. As a manifestation of her criticism around consumer life and in tune with her material sense of painting, Francés devised these homunculi as reified beings composed of scrap materials from the urban, technological world. Fragments of pipelines, a clock face, light bulbs, pieces of cables, and other mechanical items are the elements which, through assembly, are used to give shape to their anatomy, an approach clearly linked to New Realism and its defense of the "poetic recycling of the urban, industrial, and advertising reality" which Juana Francés practised so intensely in her creations as part of Man and the City. Participation Tower formed part of a larger set integrated by a further two towers, now housed in the Alicante Museum of Modern Art and the Valencian Institute of Modern Art, in which different compositions and scales are applied with the three pieces still forming one visual unit. When exhibited together, the Participation Towers formed an installation which simulated the concept of residential buildings as mentioned previously, creating a type of microurbanization which, in the words of Juana, comes to "symbolize the reality surrounding man in the current city. This city which he has created with pride but which is also his disgrace."