Diego Tonus – The Presidents’ Hammers

Within his artistic practice, Diego Tonus focuses on reproduction as a tool of investigation to question control systems and power structures by transforming images, objects, and collective experiences, revealing their underlying structures of codification and normativity. This book deals with issues arising from the silence of the original gavels used by the heads of commissions of emancipatory and revolutionary groups. He investigated their controversial nature as objects belonging to socio-democratic groups, which in turn led to a detailed remaking of these peculiar objects through drawing, carving, and varnishing, to exhibit them for the first time outside the archive.