eremuak #9
This is our ninth issue of the magazine, published each autumn by eremuak. Unlike other recent issues, in this one we have chosen not to focus on any particular theme but, rather, to follow our intuition and personal observations of the artistic scene. Although we had initially decided there would be no theme, as work on the magazine progressed, and we sent out our invitations to the different contributors, a number of different content areas and lines of work started to reoccur. One of these is the reflective capacity of art: the idea that art is a specific form of knowledge, a way of knowing, through which what we are is reflected in something else and that other thing is reflected in ourselves—a sort of iridescence that shows the interference of the reflection from an outer light and its refraction inside us.
The issue begins with several short texts written by six different artists in response to an invitation to write about the work of another artist of their choice, living or dead, from their artistic environment or elsewhere. We invited Azucena Vieites, Pello Mitxelena, M. Benito Píriz, Naia del Castillo, Estanis Comella, and Lucía C. Pino, who wrote about the work of Gretchen Bender, Miroslaw Balka, Ainhoa Lekerika, Anthea Hamilton and June Crespo, Barbara Wojirsch and Nadia Barkate, and Claudia Rebeca Lorenzo. What guided us in our choice of contributors was that in each of their perspectives, there should be a projection of the self in the other. We enjoyed seeing the kinds of knowledge that came out of this exercise.
The magazine continues with two texts by artist Juan Pérez Aguirregoikoa and curator and writer Sonia Fernández Pan, whom we asked to write in their own voices, which always necessarily include another. The first is an artist’s text, which revises quotations, landscapes, and concepts dealing with the tension between art and culture, in which there is also a palpable recognition of the loops of capitalism. The second of these texts is written from a position in which dialogue and conversation are often a starting point, or a means of knowing (oneself) in relation (to).
The publication of eremuak #9 coincides with our third edition of the eremuak group exhibition, the aim of which is to ‘take the pulse’ of our artistic environment through a collective gaze and show a particular moment in art production in this context. To this end, we commissioned a text from the Basilika collective as a review of the exhibition, projected and written without previously having seen it. This was to a certain extent an invitation to speculate on something still to come.
Finally, we present a text by Julen García Muela, who was the recipient of a grant from the eremuak continuous open call for his project, Rakel Winchester, which he was unable to finalise. We thought it important to give Julen a chance to reflect on his process, and the impossibility of completing art through desire alone.
As in other issues of the magazine, eremuak #9 includes an intervention in the centrefold, this time by Ignacio Sáez, which relates to his participation in the eremuak group exhibition. The back cover is a scanned pen drawing by Sofía Velasco, in which the artist has created an interpretation of a constellation on a piece of squared paper, which introduces and distances itself from the order the squared paper inflicts on the figure. The end pages detail activities by eremuak over the last year, including the HARRIAK 2022 programme.
Finally, we would like to welcome the artist Leire Muñoz onto our board and team of editors as of January 2022. We also say goodbye to Aimar Arriola, who is leaving our committee after four years, having also edited this issue. We thank him for his dedication and wish him the very best.
eremuak #9 is a free magazine, available at different locations in the Basque Country and Spain.
⇒ The journal is available for free here (spanish-basque).
