Admirable Gipuzkoa
If you want more information , you can access the organizer detail sheet.
Kutxa Fundazioa wishes to join in the commemoration of the thousandth anniversary of the first written document in which the word ‘Ipuscoa’ appears with a revision of the book published in 1932 by Pascual Marín, entitled Lo admirable de Guipúzcoa. The revision consists of a photographic project for which four photographers have been invited: María Azkarate, Peter Bialobrzeski, Dragana Jurišić and Lobo Altuna.
Each of them has approached, from a different perspective, the phenomenon of topophilia in its two components: a social group and a delimited environment. Topophilia as the relationship of affection that unites a social group with its environment, which makes it stay there despite, for example, adverse conditions, or maintain an emotional bond with the land it had to leave.
Territory is understood today as a social, historical and symbolic construction. It is not something given, but something created, lived and given meaning over time. Everyday practices, social relations, infrastructures, rituals, architecture and art configure the territory as a fabric of meanings. This fabric is neither homogeneous nor stable; it is subject to constant conflict and change depending on economic and social variables.
María Azkarate shows us how the edge, which is not a line but a space in itself, has always been in that duality between the invisibility of the present and its construction in memory.
Peter Bialobrzeski has constructed a series in which modernity and memory are combined in a landscape that breaks with the idea of heritage, integrating itself into the complexity of a mixed reality, in which traditions are not exactly mixed with modernity, but with a specific way of interpreting and adapting the modern.
Dragana Jurišić sets out to show not how we are, but how we are seen. This game involves interposing between the gaze and the object a series of cultural conditioning factors that are those of those who look at us. His gaze is purely poetic, a reaction to the contrast between the world he confronts and the ideas that reside in the mind of the beholder.
The tour concludes with a vision of the human landscape by Lobo Altuna. If at the beginning we spoke of topophilia, now we have to consider the combination of this feeling with those who have to rebuild theirs among us, combining their customs with ours and creating a new society that is as mixed as it is unstoppable.