Archivo F.X., which Pedro G. Romero has been compiling since 1999, is an archive devoted to iconoclasm, profanation and blasphemy and their intersections with the radical practices of modern and contemporary art and aesthetics.

The chekas (spelled with k instead of c, to distinguish these particular constructions from checas, the illegal detention centres which proliferated during the Spanish Civil War on both sides) leveraged elements culled from modern art, particularly from the Bauhaus during Wassily Kandinsky’s tenure there, to carry out what was called psychotechnical torture on detainees. More than on their effectiveness, the attention is focused on the alteration of some of the utopian and spiritual tropes of modern art and design, in which what was supposed to liberate and expand the consciousness was now used to punish and subjugate.