What is the role of art in moments of social transformation? How can the re-enactment of concrete art events from historic turning points can help us to reconceptualise moments of civil instability in thempresent? How might we understand democratic society as a form of creature, one that grows and requires care, and what kinds of traces does this creature leave behind?

This practice-led research considers three art events linked with recent Spanish history that I revisit through the development of three large-scale art projects presented as case studies. It adresses three art events ran by other artists in the past embarking on intense historical research of the particular episodes in order to offer a reconsideration of its impact, legacy and translation within the present context. Hence, each project also helps to analyse and portraits aspects of the present Spanish socio-political actual realm.

The project speculates on the presented case studies as three exercises of artistic re-enactment; all the specific techniques and supports involved in their creation are selected through a work of mediaarchaeology that conceptually links them with the specific past art events that are being artistically revisited.

The title of this research (The Trace of the Democratic Creature) is informed by the ideas of the paediatrician and relational psychoanalyst D.W Winnicott who at some point compares the child with society and Maturity with Democracy. The research case studies rescue past art events coming from social paradigm shifts as the formation of new states and early democracies in order to see if they can affect our better understanding of the power control structures in the now. In this sense, it looks at our common wealth realities as creatures in our custody needing constant care in a context with constant threats.

In the subtitle of this research (Art Practice as Transitory Phenomena through Re-enactment) Art initiatives are presented as hypothetic transitory phenomena in the framework of relational psychoanalysis. Inspired by the idees of Winnicott’s transitional object, relational psychoanalysis puts special attention on the framing of the psychoanalitical setting, understunding that some objects can give ‘support’ to society in certain moments of its developmental process. In this sense, this project also reflects on the role of art institutions as platforms that must take care of the setting in which art projects dealing wiht the past take place in order to be effective.