Fernando Sánchez Castillo

The ‘great men’ who have determined the course of history seem to have become a bit smaller in the meantime. But Fernando Sánchez Castillo, who just about experienced the Spanish dictator Franco, doesn’t allow himself to be fooled. Everywhere he still sees monuments and statues celebrating political and religious power, and since he knows that power will always exert an enormous attraction on people, he assails them with flaming sculptures, videos and performances. The video film Rich Cat dies of Heart Attack in Chicago, for example, shows how the bronze head of a dictator is rolled through a village, dragged behind a car, thrown into a ravine and finally shot at by a sharpshooter.

The work that Sánchez Castillo has made for the large lake in Sonsbeek Park is called Spitting Leaders. We see the busts of famous despots from various centuries sticking out above the water. They are immediately recognizable as the heads of statues, but their overconfidence has gone. What is being said here? That the bronze rulers have been pushed into the water by their grumbling subjects? Or that the great country where they grace their pedestals has in the meantime become submerged under water up to their necks? In any case, there is every reason for the fallen he-men to bear hard feelings. They are spitting like sculpted fishes in a fountain - at each other, of course. For whose fault is it when your power crumbles? Another power!

One of the Spitting Leaders was carried during the Procession by the Guild of Lawyers.