Activities, exhibitions and projects

Image: Zehar issues (1989-2011), the magazine published by Miren Eraso

A Través De La Arena (Across the Sand) is a project in various episodes that takes as its starting point two magazines focused on art and enquiry that come from two different geographies and ways of doing: Arena (1989) and Zehar [“through” in Basque] (1989-2011). Two publishing projects conceived with the desire to generate contexts as counterpoints to the consensus and the lack of memory that defined the following decade: a period characterised by a belonging to a “system of positive echoes” (as the editor of Zehar, Miren Eraso, would write), in a sociopolitical and cultural space with an “absolute majority syndrome” (as the editor of Arena, Mar Villaespesa, would point out after the victory of the Socialist party in 1982).

However, far from setting out to confront these publications from a historicist point of view, this exhibition proposes a conversation with them that is multiple, polysemic and mutable. It invites us to breathe new life into the archive from a different perspective. An invitation that responds to a desire to generate and share a situated knowledge around a thorough and feminist editing, but also a lack of contour, community and context from all of those people who grew up during the years of what we might call a headlong rush.

The different proposals presented, as well as the public programme alongside it, try to navigate the increasing paradoxes that, as they emerge with the crisis of modernity, define the contemporary condition and the spaces of mediation in their struggles for recognition. All of them share a desire to contrast narratives, to make visible the underlying frictions, and to propose mechanisms through which to celebrate dissent as a potential with which to continue to provide spaces in which to rehearse critical thinking.