"Degrow" exhibition brochure

Exhibition

Bene Bergado / Degrow

23.06.29-24.01.07

Introduction

The exhibition

We live in times of rampant consumerism, obsessed with economic enrichment and a society dazzled by the brilliance of great luxuries. Consumerism is the new religion for millions around the world, and this addiction, coupled with financial fundamentalism, sustains an economic model which devours natural resources. We waste things without any consideration for the resources nature has conserved for millions of years, which leads us to the global crisis in which we find ourselves immersed along with depletion of natural resources.

In this exhibition, the sculptress Bene Bergado offers the verb Degrow as an infinitive, as a kind of suspension against unlimited growth. Therefore, if the infinitive is a heading, an impersonal signature, then the works are a personal gerund.

The degrowth thought current proposes a controlled regular reduction of production to establish a new balance between mankind and the planet earth as our sole option for survival based on frugality and selflimitation. To put it in a nutshell, “living better with less”.

Degrowth is not going to be an option but rather an imposition due to the devastating impact of economic growth.

Degrow means living better with less: reassess, reconceptualise, restructure, relocate, redistribute, reduce, reuse and recycle.

Bene Bergado

Thus, Degrow is a call for action from art in response to the current situation of uncontrolled growth and exhaustion of resources. The exhibition installations and sculptures, curated by the artist Juan Luis Moraza, dialogue with the need for deceleration through awareness of limits, to adapt to a foreseeable future of low energy and inevitable life changes. Degrow shows the tension dynamics between art and what it is about, i.e. between its artistic processes and their most explicit themes.

Degrow is a site specific for Azkuna Zentroa´s Exhibition Hall. It includes audiovisual elements, installations created for this exhibition and a display of reconfigured works by Bene Bergado from the 90s, which have never been exhibited until now. The centerpiece is Tierra Quemada, a large format art installation. It is a 30 meters high electric tower fragmented into 4 parts. This tower that seems to have fallen is a discarded dismantled pylon turned into a habitat or refuge.

The artist

Born in Salamanca, Bene Bergado has lived and studied in Bilbao. Degrow means her return to the city where she took her first professional steps, with a project delving into questions already mentioned in previous works and where biographical and ideological aspects blend together.

Bene Bergado graduated in Fine Arts via the University of the Basque Country in 1985 and on completing her studies she began her career as an artist with a Scholarship from Bizkaia Professional Council in 1986. She became a professor at the Bilbao Faculty of Fine Arts in 1987. She took part in the 1992 Young Art Exhibition and the exhibition DISTANCE 0 curated by José Luis Brea in 1994. She moved to Madrid to live and work in 1998 after lecturing for 10 years at the UPV/EHU Faculty of fine Arts.

The curator Sculptor Juan Luis Moraza has been holding solo exhibitions and participating in group collections since 1980.

Tenured professor at the University of Vigo, he lectures on Master´s Degrees and Doctorate programmes at several universities. He has curated at Artium, Reina Sofía, Guggenheim-Bilbao and La Casa Encendida, among other places. He is the author of books such as Corduras (2007), Ornamento y Ley (2007), Formas del límite (2006), MA(non É)DONNA, Imágenes de creación, Procreación y anticoncepción (1993), Seis sexos de la diferencia (1990), likewise numerous essays in collaboration books, specialised journals, catalogues and newspapers.

We live as if we had 1.75 planet Earths at our disposal.

World Wildflife Fund (WWF)

Activity programme The exhibition is extended via the educational programme for school children and families, where the concept of degrowth is deployed locally and globally, geopolitically and environmentally, personally and collectively.

Introductory visits to the exhibition From 13th July Time: Thursdays at 6:30 p.m.

Duration: 45 minutes Spanish and Basque on request. On the first Thursday of every month, visit will be in Basque Capacity: 20 people max. per visit, plus the guide Minimum capacity: 4 people Registration: Free admission prior registration at AZ Info, at the Exhibition Hall, via telephone 944 014 014 or email to info@azkunazentroa.eus

Publication The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication as a project catalogue.

Should you be interested in this publication, please mail us at info@azkunazentroa.eus and we will let you know when it goes on sale.

Family visit programme Open tour of the exhibition through a map with representations of the exhibition works to generate family dialogue and foster curiosity in terms of perspective and reflection.

Request the map in the Exhibition Hall foyer.

School programme Through collective activity on the textile production process and consumption, the students comprehend their own acts of consumption in relation to the origin of raw materials, place of product processing and waste areas.

Arranged with schools.

Every Thursday during the academic year, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. from September to December, 2023 Registrations: info@azkunazentroa.eus

Audio guides

EXHIBITION HALL I. Componentes Componentes consists of the revised screening of the PROSPECTO video produced in 2016, where a list of food additives, which are part of the foods produced by the agrifood industry and their processing, runs across the screen like film credits. These doses subject our bodies in the medium and long-term to unknown organic destabilisation processes, just like all the other chemicals we interact with daily. Thus, they behave like opposing components, as resident “Trojan Horses”. The title Componentes emphasises this confrontation within the internal environment of our metabolism.

EXHIBITION HALL III. Batería Undoubtedly, nutrition is the most intimate and constituent interaction involving living beings in their environmental reciprocity. Whether natural or artificial, organic or inorganic, everything exists as a structural tension between components and opponents. As living beings, we maintain our structural stability via an ongoing process of exchanging matter, energy and information, which must be managed in order to establish its integrity. The fragility of a system consists of its capacity to reconfigure the dynamic balance between opponents and components.

Batería is an installation comprising 20 metre industrial shelving where the works, materials, installations and documentation of the artist´s entire artistic career are piled up, likewise elements related to the preparation process of this exhibition. Some pieces have given way to the generation of others, and the density of their juxtapositions and oppositions is not only intended to show how something is done, but also to interconnect forms, contents, materials and stages.

Acting as a generating battery, as a pile-up and pile, this great shelving is a metaphor and metonym of the manufacturing process. It is not an archive, nor is it merely a

warehouse where materials appeal for their availability, but rather an installation that piles works and materials while testing a battery where those elements generate an energetic and procedural situation.

Each artist works from his/her desire on the base of a sensitive symbolic legacy. Their own works and those of others exist in their relationships and conductivity. And each moment of creation entwines a retrospective outlook with a prospective one. Just like a battery, the artist’s background not only reveals his/her processes but it also activates the interconnections of these materials, energy condensations which generate new connections by themselves.

EXHIBITION HALL III

EXHIBITION HALL I

EXHIBITION HALL IV EXHIBITION HALL II

EXHIBITION HALL II. Abatimiento de encuentro y ornamento: Encuentro y ornamento is an installation comprising two dozen plates, some whole, others broken, melted in bronze and enamelled. Instead of a decorative drawing, each plate includes a significant personal or social date in the artist’s life. They are painted in two colours, some gold and others black.

In the original version the plates were placed on a surface made of two virgin linen canvases. This surface is divided by a table tennis net that is not centred, but in an aureus section, conditioning a game of unequal opportunities. This game table, on which the plates were piled up as if after a confrontation, was located on a scaffolding structure. The word “encounter” refers to a meeting or approximation but also a dispute, a confrontation both sporting and conflictive.

Breaking a plate is a metaphor for the loss of innocence and the consequences of the commitment to live and, therefore, each break-up is also a beginning.

Abatimiento de encuentro y ornamento brings the tablecanvases back to their status as a “representation plane” yet, by doing so, it eliminates even the possibility of play, by doing away with that real-symbolic support. Consequently, even the encounter and one’s personal life dissolve into a collapse where unequal opportunities melt away in the absence of possibilities. The broken plates fall on the ground, “they land”.

EXHIBITION HALL IV. Tierra quemada Tierra quemada is an installation whose central hub is a fragmented C-500-22 electric pylon. Electric pylons belong to the monumental tradition of authority’s signs pursuant to the logic of height and position. They are strictly structural supports that do not sustain a figure. Rather, they sustain transmission itself, the flow of energy and information as figures of a new authority without an image.

The fallen pylons are part of a long tradition of negative monumentalism, such as discredited scenes, destitute monuments and signs of the system collapse. However, this work is also about survival in spite of everything, about the vital energy to create a home wherever you go, no matter how awful the situation might be, and about generating value with what you have at hand, enjoying the little things in life.

This is a discarded dismantled pylon turned into a habitat or refuge. As in the artist’s series of works titled TRAMPAS, this space is the support for scattered signs of a precarious settlement: areas of parquet flooring, sleeping bags, models, food remains, shoes, broken or decomposed suitcases (some of these objects have been cast in bronze, playing with the idea of durability for the perishable and insignificant), and other signs of settlement.