Ixone Sádaba: Lemoniz essay

Bilbao,

Next year, twenty will be fulfilled since the Bilbao artist Ixone Sádaba premiered in the Reina Sofía Museum an exhibition cycle, then called Productionsbased on the presentation of specific projects for the MNCARS by artists at that time in its consolidation stage: it was selected as a member of a generation of authors who proposed a visual order conceived from virtualization and simulation, that is, it uses in their work of images that supplant their referents in the real field 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.

Ixone Sádaba. 1: 1 scale. Azkuna Zentroa

In 2020 Sádaba received a Leonardo scholarship from the BBVA Foundation that allowed him to study for two years the environment and ruins of the Lemoniz nuclear power plant, in Vizcaya (also, also, of an Aranberri Ion project). 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 symbolic terrain of confrontation.

For the artist, this infrastructure, even in disuse, symbolizes a general industrial development project that emerged after World War II and 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, this not culminated by the Bilbao author has served to question what points they can improve current research and practices when improving relationships between individuals and landscapes.

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 Layers of history and also of future potentials of that architecture.

The ultimate goal of this exhibition, which has commissioned Carles Guerra and includes a replica of the viewpoint raised in 1974 to visit the construction works -at the way of watchtower at a crossroads of the past, present and future -is to propose that Lemoniz becomes the center of a public debate around memory, a critical review and perhaps dispassionate, given the time that the central one could imply and imply

In parallel to this exhibition, Azkuna Zentroa will host the talk on April 2 Learning from lemoniz. 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-Ddornburg will analyze the ramifications of the Sádaba project.