Ixone Sádaba: Lemoiz essay

Bilbao,

In 2020 Ixone Sádaba a Leonardo scholarship from the BBVA Foundation that allowed him to study for two years the environment and ruins of the Lemoiz nuclear power plant, in Vizcaya. Its construction raised in the seventy social and political controversies that were mitigated in 1984, when its plan was paralyzed and the unfinished building was more or less forgotten and abandoned, although that place continues to be contemplated as a terrain of confrontation in the symbolic plane; It must be remembered that it was projected in the final stage of Franco, they opposed their implementation civil collectives and environmental groups and that it was the subject of a terrorist attack.

For the artist, this infrastructure, even in disuse, offers political, material and historical readings: it embodies a general industrial development project that arose after World War II and that has had destabilizing consequences on the environment and on social structures. Links it with a way of doing politics, from Rome to modernity (Sádaba has been one of the last scholarship by the Royal Academy of Spain in the Italian capital), which qualifies as Simplifying, ethnocentric, objective and destructive. In short, it has served that center not completed to the Bilbao author to question what points they can improve current research and practices when improving relationships between individuals and landscapes, but their inquiries have gone further.

The fruits of that work can now be visited in Azkuna Zentroa: the artist has tried to introduce into the exhibition hall of which Alhóndiga was, at a 1: 1 scale and hence the title of this sample, an recomposition of the central to real size through projections of photographs of walls and views of the complex raised in the Cala Basordas of 1972 to that 1984: a concrete mole History and also of future potentials of that architecture, may be associated with a new access policy (today is closed).

Carles Guerra, who was director of the Museu Tàpies, has curated this exhibition, which includes, at the beginning of the tour, a replica of the viewpoint raised in 1974 to visit the construction works -at the watchtower mode at a crossroads between the past, present and future times. Located the original next to the access road, it was employed by those responsible for Iberduero, the construction company, including its president, the Count of Canagua, so it rises its own financial and political dimension.

The ultimate goal of the sample is to propose that Lemoiz becomes the center of a public debate around memory, a critical and perhaps dispassionate review, given the time elapsed, of which the central implied and could involve; And also a review of the possibilities of documentary photography when dealing with an (empirical) object so dense, in a physical and significant sense, such as this installation. Its aesthetics is, therefore, that of the report.

Two boxes of light are part of the exhibition, called Take oblivion to the future #1 and #5that we can understand as manifestations of a photographic practice that melts with the objects found among the ruins of the central itself, recycled for the occasion: by combining these remains with the photos captured in that environment, it generates a different object modality. They were Sádaba’s starting point to formulate, once again, a possible understanding of photography as a device and conceive a proxya visual substitute for the central that does not reduce its dimensions: in this way it has been able to enter this space maintaining its real scale.

The result materializes in a set of photographic sequences that show segments of the buildings of the Central and its surroundings: the views follow each other without globally allowing an exhaustive vision of this place to appreciate. In the background, two wounds are articulated around “scale 1: 1”: the one that has Lemoiz as a scenario, in the Basque context, and the injuries that history has caused on the body, physical and not only, of photography.

In parallel to this exhibition, Azkuna Zentroa will host the talk on April 2 Learning from Lemoiz. Political contamination, photography and post -conflictin which the artist and the commissioner, the sociologist Iñaki Martínez de Albéniz and the architect and photographer Julia Schulz-Urdnburg will analyze the ramifications of the Sádaba project; In addition to guided tours and school activities.

Ixone Sádaba. 1: 1 scale. Azkuna Zentroa

Ixone Sádaba belongs to a generation of authors who, since the beginning of the 2000s, propose a visual order conceived from virtualization and simulation, that is, it uses in their images of images that impersonate their referents in the field of the real to give rise to a staged world in which multiple narrative options fit. They would mean, these works, the emblem of a new era, ours, which we cannot understand from parameters outside the technical image.

Formed in Fine Arts and social and cultural anthropology, he has worked in the fields of performance, installation and photography, and precisely one of his most interesting first creations was the series (photographic) Citerónin reference to the mountain where the first Dionysian bachanals were held, considered origin of the Greek theater, and to the theatrical and ritual character of its production for the representation of intimate conflicts and tensions, for which it used its unfolded body. Their stages, digitally manipulated, take place in emblematic scenarios and that is why they will generate in the spectator strangely when placing it to fictions that perhaps have to do with their personal obsessions and that develop in those orders of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary.

Another significant proposal of its beginnings was Phlegmonéformed by nine panoramic photos taken in different spaces of Bilbao in which it carried out many other different actions: rites equally linked to the Bacchic and the dreamlike and raised as superimposed narrative levels.