eremuak #10

“We need to try to differentiate the moment something might happen from the possibility of something happening.”

Art can often seem to appear in acts of a kind of transfer, shifts that refer us back to
life and experience rather than to representation. Operations which generate relations through affect – by which we understand something not only emotional, though that as well, but everything that is affected by two bodies coming into contact; bodies which also carry their own internal relationships.

Affecting involves resistance, and at the same time only occurs when the circumstances are right. It is in that paradoxical state that the subject emerges and subjectivation takes place. Resistance is part of what constitutes an affectionate relationship; it arises as a force that can resist the inertia of established conventions through the appearance of singularities, stratified “points, knots or focuses” which affect each other, enabling change.

Art is never where we expect it to be, and requires restlessness and movement as the surest indications of that continuous effervescence, life. As we edited this magazine, we trusted that we do not know that we know, and in the sensibilities of our writers, who avoided previous certainties as they tackled each of their contributions. The contents were given space to develop openly, with each person’s working process seen as an open state, allowing for movement and preventing forms of externally-driven inertia from entering.

This magazine is not an attempt to narrate a reality, but to present it as it is made, paying attention to many different singularities and subjectivities. In the invitations to our contributors we asked them to share their own particular circumstance. To isolate the moment previous to undertaking their work, the attitude that predisposes them to create their own conditions and trust that their choices will be significant.

Maddi Barber begins with the image of a pair of roosters wandering a forest at night for a fiction script called Claros de Bosque, a project whose title is taken from María Zambrano’s book of the same name. Years later, on her hard disk, there is a folder labelled Claros de Bosque. There are three folders inside, 1, 2 and 3, and a photo from the edge of the river Urrobi. Maddi describes this as her “first moment” before getting to work. Her text describes the three phases of her film, whose script displays a detailed aesthetic, zooming in our attention on each of the irreplaceable parts that make up the puzzle of reality, with hunters that don’t hunt, four-by-fours, digital green trees and a lot of fog. And the roosters.

The psychologist Mertxe Murua writes about the physicist Jean-Pierre Garnier Malet’s Doubling Theory of time and space. She explains how imperceptible instants or “time openings” exist in our present, in which experiences we are not conscious of occur. The importance of benevolence according to Garnier Malet should lead us to become more aware of our responsibility for our own thoughts.

Sensations are different to ideas and are one of the hardest things to describe. Sensations are more complicated to explain than ideas, and different to a strong intuition; they’re vague, yet so intense they can take possession of us.

As if we were wanting this issue to be a kind of adrenaline-rush mixtape, the simple caligram, “es obvio que las Mimosas están hablando”, followed by a songbook proposed by Elena and Borja are a pilot test in the form of a podcast suggesting “how to use your voice to tell something”.

The centrefold by Hinrich Sachs with Samo Tomšič is a visual reflection on the relationship between language as a stable body and language as unstable, variable, lived experience.

IbonRG with his delightful formal experiment “predikatzen dugunarekin”, a premonitory monolistening rehearsal in two voices; his own voice as a technical instrument for knowledge that echoes back to us as if it were an effect; and cacophony, a multitude of improbably certainties on any creative process, including his own.

The rites and codes of governing and sustaining any subculture have much more to do with this: an exercise of singularisation of certain sensibilities, which will find no means of expression that agrees with their surrounding reality, and are thus forced to create their own – eccentric, sometimes self-parodying – clandestine language.

On the other hand, the transcription of a scripted conversation between the writer Stewart Home and the artist and activist Itziar Bilbao on several of the projects that the artist and the author of Defiant Pose have done together becomes a framework for intersecting experiential references embedded in subcultures and socio-political and cultural contexts that are as equivalent as they are paradoxical. Take it Like a Punk dissects a vital, historical moment – for the authors –, from commitment and dissident militancy to hedonism and dissidence in all its imaginable forms.

Estrella de Diego, taking as a pretext four simultaneous exhibitions by four sculptors (three of them Basque) at the CA2M, makes a particular, idiosyncratic dissertation on “new Basque” sculpture and its formal processes of producing subjectivity.

And to close, Miel Oyarzabal proposes a collage on the back of the magazine, with a scene that moves between different scales. This work shows specificity in the treatment and multidimensional specificity of each fragment. The image presented as a hardened reality from an aerial viewpoint, in search of a Subject.

Finally, we will take this opportunity to welcome artist Iñaki Garmendia as a member of the eremuak technical committee and the editorial team of this magazine as from January 2023.

eremuak #10 is freely available at various distribution points in the Basque Autonomous Community and the Spanish State, and it can be freely downloaded, including in English, from the website www.eremuak.eus.

⇒ The journal is available for free here (spanish-basque).


Edition: 2023ko urria | Aleak:1500 | 82 orrialde
Editprs: José Ramón Amondarain, Leire Muñoz, Iñaki Garmendia
Coordination and graphic design:  Maite Zabaleta Nerecán
Text edition: Marina Balenciaga Juaristi
English translations: Toni Crabb