We are greeted by a potent title: Desatando a Mon-dragón (Unleashing Mon-dragon). At first glance, it could be mistaken for Detestando a Mondragón (Detesting Mondragón) or Despegando a Mondragón (Detaching Mondragón). The poster, featuring a foreshortened face with skin peeling away, anticipates that Mondragón will be more “detached” than unleashed or detested.

At the opening, the Arrasate culture official warns: this is not an exhibition about the town. The cloister, however, creates the opposite expectation, filled with imagery related to the erraldoias and kilikis (giants and big-heads). Their molds hang from the walls; two backlit images project their busts; their heads lie on the floor, pierced by cables. In one corner, with their skirts lifted, some of them rest facing the wall, while children and families swarm around them.

Incorporating the troupe of Erraldoias and Kilikis, detaching them from their usual duties, is a successful “coup de théâtre” by Maite, the curator. Respecting the interests of all involved, she creates a coexistence between the artistic field and the social sphere through the material presence of the summoned elements.

Soon, we are also summoned as an audience for the performances. Silence is requested, and we are warned that they might seem strange. Performance is a demanding discipline: even though it is the performer who provides the protagonist body, it requires the audience to become involved to create a shared time where gestures are amplified. Full attention allows even the slightest gesture, such as breathing, to be perceived. Conversely, that breath will go completely unnoticed in almost any other situation, even for the performer. Therefore, performance demands a sensitive and attentive correspondence. Otherwise, it can generate frustration in the spectator—the feeling of facing an artistic discipline hollow of meaning, lacking a shared experience. It is a frustration similar to being forced to sustain one’s gaze for a long time at a mundane still life. It would only lead the spectator to wonder: Why am I standing in front of you?

The first performance is by Cata Rubio and Izar Okariz. Both lie down in two corners of the cloister, and the audience views them from the balcony. They play dead for a while and then begin to stretch and wake. Cata, anchored in the vertical plane, breathes with exaggerated movements, her head completely covered by her mane of hair.

Izar writhes little by little. Like a statue or an erraldoi waking from a long lethargy, she seems to be testing her movement options for the first time—the possibility of breaking away from the vertical and horizontal axes. She climbs up to the balcony like an animal, camouflaging herself among the people; she hides and corners herself out of focus, playing with our gaze. This displacement makes the space appear differently because it unravels the initial geometry and turns the movement “gritty.” The fact that Izar also hides her face strips away humanity and, although the movement is her own, at times the clothes seem to hold the body, like an invisible man betrayed by his garments. As time passes, observing two bodies that do not look at the space they inhabit becomes a morbid activity.

It is not easy to guess why there are two performers—why the pair. Perhaps it simply responds to the need for companionship in the process. The second performance begins. The children arrive, serious and ceremonial, caught up in the atmosphere. The children’s desire to “make themselves big” is curious. They dance while carrying the erraldoias: first to the rhythm of folk music and then to the music produced by Iraia Pérez. The constant movement of the erraldoias makes it so that nothing moves (when everything moves, nothing moves). While charming at first glance, the scene quickly reveals its limits, as it generates nothing beyond the sentence that enunciates it: bringing together children, folklore, and experimental music.

After the activities, the exhibition appears in silence with works by Cata Rubio, Iraia Pérez, Oier Diaz, and Izar Okariz. Interspersed with the molds of the erraldoias, it is not easy to identify their authorship. Notable pieces include a sequence of drawings of animals fleeing forward, clay figures imitating postures seen in the performance, and a stack of stories torn from a notebook. A double condition draws attention: the amateur nature of the procedures and the timid or elusive quality of some gestures.

There is something very naturalized in the use of procedures typical of art students: animal drawings torn from a watercolor pad and taped directly onto the wall, clay figures molded by hand and unconstrained by firing, or stories written in a gridded notebook. None are refined or professionalized, nor are they “denatured” with irony. The prominence of these representations does not seem to lie in the relationship between form and structure, nor is it the result of a system, but rather in the “peeling off” of a sensitive process of exploration, like a memory. The gesture in the exhibition consists of detaching that process and displaying it.

This gesture evokes a poetic position of flight from language: the animals flee and become blurred, the figures hide and break between the columns, the texts leave the hand of whoever takes them. The evoked spectator is one who has found a drawing in their mailbox, not someone who enters a square and faces a statue in the center.

Three drawings stand out for their singularity. Hidden away are three sand drawings: a lamb floating statically on the page, a very blurred wild boar, and a person amidst what could be a crowd or a forest. They are drawings disloyal to the predominant circular orbit of the exhibition; they breathe against the tide and open up their own space to be. As if to say: I belong and I do not belong; I am here, but I could leave at any moment.

Unleashing mon-dragon

11/27/2025 – 12/20/2025
KULTURATE, Arrasate

Cata Rubio & Izar Okariz
Iraia Perez
Oier Diaz
Arrasateko Erraldoi eta Kilikien Konpartsa

Mediation: Maite Mugerza