“If there is to be a revolution there must be a party”. This is how one of the most iconic and politically engaged book of the century would start if we applied an intentional filter. This filter would hide the parts of the slogans and sentences that eventually got obsolete in the last decades. The book is the Little Red One: “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung”, the second most printed book in History (after the Bible) that can only be found nowadays in China in tourist shops. In an attempt to build a documentary object that pushes the limits of documenting with images, the series “Party” presents a deliberately personal approach to contemporary Chinese society and adds layers of significance by choosing a loaded platform. Using censorship to erase the parts of the text that are no longer in use in the country’s routine, the resulting pages become a script where matching images build a series of diptychs that vehemently raise the question of the real nature of Communism in modern China.

The combination of this manipulated text and image pairs pieces of information that aim to portray China empathetically, appealing to our own clichés towards the country and their bipolar political structure. The series reproduce the matching pages of the book “Party” published by RM and the Archive of Modern Conflict and combine serigraphs of the censored texts with images captured by the artist Cristina De Middel during her trips to China.

Again the artist explores the boundaries and limits in the use of the photographic image to build truthful graphic testimonies and to raise the debate about the construction of the opinion and History and the role that photography has been playing so far.