La Settimana Enigmistica

La Settimana Enigmistica (2015) is part of the series of news-stands Francesc Ruiz uses as a resource to address different questions in contemporary society he deems worthy of attention. The kiosks are devices which, from the street, allow the artist to analyse the social and political situation and to introduce the practices of comics and drawing — his usual working mediums, grouped into what he calls the “expanded comic” — into the exhibition room. Portable kiosks, informal places of encounter within the urban street structure, take a system of distributing goods, normativity and ideology, as well as generating and hiding codes, to the streets. This piece, part of the Spanish Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale under the title Edicola Mundo (Kiosk World), recreates, through interventions with the typeface and style of the Italian magazine La Settimana Enigmistica, the newspapers and headlines from 12 March of the same year, the day on which the press announced the final acquittal of Berlusconi over the Ruby Rubacuori case. In his intervention, Ruiz alters the narrative in an allusion to media manipulation and the rhetoric upon which certain political and economic interests are upheld, as well as to Berlusconi’s term in office.