lerro gurutzatuak (crossed lines)

Lerro gurutzatuak (crossed lines) shows analogies between contents of different origins. On the one hand, it presents a collection of popular local beliefs and traditions as well as a number of happenings or details associated with these. On the other, descriptions or illustrations of the works of (in most cases) contemporary artists.

These analogies are formal and casual, but allow us to speculate about how or why these beliefs might exist, how they have evolved, and the reasons for these similarities in such different cultural contexts.

The Italian historian, Carlo Ginzburg, has studied oral cultures of which there is very little written evidence and has tried to reconstruct them by means of studying seemingly irrelevant traces, signs and details. Through the typological or formal comparison of beliefs, he pointed out the similarities that exist between the myths of peoples separated by long distances.  He struggled between the hypothesis of a historical connection which he was unable to prove and which he dismissed initially and a purely formal link; this was the most plausible but nevertheless he resisted. He rejected the idea of an unconscious human tendency towards certain imagery or a simple question of chance.

This project is also based on typological comparison. It presents signs, data, occurrences. Several elements are repeated or coincide, giving the impression that there is an underlying system of interwoven wires or that there are a number of almost invisible strata. As an artist (and not as a historian or anthropologist), rather than collecting customs, myths and local history, I have tried to be one more link in the oral chain, making an intuitive or manipulative selection. The works of art have also been selected based on my own preferences – similarity alone is not sufficient; they are works and artists with whom I feel a special affinity or complicity.