gio bat

A mechanism that starts to work when it is used by a group of people who manipulate the moving spears fixed to the structure of an exhibition space, a mechanism that becomes the material to be worked on, as a kind of prolongation of the body, with which to try out new ways of occupying it with “deployments” that go from one side to the other. In order to materialise physically, through body and movement, the material relationship with the place through technological supports and their dynamics, it is necessary to reconsider the way that this mechanism is presented: one, focused on “the object/mechanism in itself”, more expressive and static; another more focused on “the act of transformation” carried out on the more kinetic and transitive mechanism/object itself.

Gio bat, Zabala 16, was the first intervention carried out in August 2013. Six cameras recorded that act. Not only does this material refer to the action but in its previous articulation and subsequent arrangement it is shown just as it is: the result of an intervention materialised and constructed in video and which is used as the starting point and backbone of the project.

Gio bat-Discoteca: An image that is broken up and saturated until it forms a single mass of the dance floor. The insertion of the device and its arrangement in a greater structure (the discotheque) influences the movement of the people who work in that place. The physical arrangement of the operators with regard to the space and the bodies that gradually form gaps and densities, inertias and tensions that the subjective cameras fixed to each spear will have to record while the intervention is in progress. Each intervention is resolved at a physical level and includes the amplification of the body without any attempt to interpret the human form, but, assuming the shapelessness of the bodies, strives to reach the deliberate deconstruction of the body in order to transform the human figure into a “realistic” representation.

The technical alterations, the overlapping of bodies and their movements generate a single image, a long and concentrated view. A kind of attention maintained in time.

Gio bat inauguration: 10 January 2015 8pm | c/ Dos de mayo 19, Bilbao

Inauguration of GIO BAT, the stage in which concerns and opinions are voiced on the long-term project of the same name, developed by the artist Manu Uranga (Gio bat-Zabala, Gio bat-Txitxarro and Gio bat-Bulegoa z/b).

GIO BAT is based on a fixed element: a specific space (located on Calle Dos de Mayo 19) with the addition on this occasion of a dynamic component consisting of the disruptive and intermittent participation of artists who collaborated during previous stages of the project. It deals therefore with a body of action-intervention disseminated over time, with the idea of focusing on the relations involved in the production of all artistic practices, beyond questions of collaboration and curatorial logic.