Better than any of Bleda and Rosa’s other endeavors, the “Origin” series (2003–) realizes the project underpinning their work as a whole. Interested in neither landscape nor ornament, this project is characterized by an impulse toward historiographical interrogation close in spirit to Walter Benjamin’s “absolute materialism.” As in Benjamin’s meditations on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, 1920, María Bleda and José María Rosa (who have been working together since 1992) take an approach to historical objects marked by the basic will to recover a lost or suppressed history in those objects. The “act