Bestea naiz. The other is me. Alicia Chillida

Bestea naiz approaches the phenomenon of migration from an artistic and international perspective, through the work of creators whose language explores reality in a political and poetic key. This exhibition transits between the particular and the universal and contemplates the modern evolution of Gipuzkoa from the period 1950-1970, when a great migratory movement transformed its social structure and ethnic composition. Arjun Appadurai describes modernity as a new stage where major flows restructure the life of societies throughout the planet, particularly the flow of migration and information, but also where "the work of the imagination is conceived as a major constituent element of modern subjectivity". The artistic imagination is thus, more than ever, a stage for action. "Mass migrations (whether voluntary or forced) are not a new phenomenon in the history of humanity," continues the anthropologist, "but when we juxtapose them with the speed of the flow of images, scripts and sensations conveyed by the mass media, we have as a result a new order of instability in the production of subjectivities."

Is art capable of constituting a force that interferes in the global game of politics? The artists in this exhibition address the issue of migration directly or tangentially, often as a subtext in relation to other aspects generated by it, such as cultural translation, violence, wars, the crisis of the idea of progress, the circulation of matter and objects, the limits of art and culture, etc. The exhibition route draws an argument, a walk that the viewer must trace to be read/perceived.

Bruno Latour argues that "for the first time, we can remove the brackets to this particular form of political philosophy to imagine a successor speaking openly of political epistemology, on condition that the sciences - and not Science - are combined with the question of the collective and not with the prison of the social. (…). Political ecology, then, would be defined as the conjunction of ecology and politics, of things and people, of nature and society".

This project speaks of otherness to investigate the conditions of possibility of overcoming the ethnocentric and anthropocentric self in order to reformulate a new established order based on the idea of community.

(Excerpt from the catalog, ed. Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, Donostia-San Sebastián, 2018).