Iratxe Jaio + Klaas van Gorkum

Expanding the Frame is a self-initiated exhibition by the Ackersdijkstraat 20 studio complex to celebrate the start of summer and the lifting of the corona restrictions. Cinema is the red thread that will run through the great diversity of artistic practices in the studio complex during this event. The artists and some specially invited guests will present their work using cinematographic elements such as time, movement, narration, light, sound or scenography. The exhibition is free to visit on the 3rd and 4th of July 2021.

Both the Artium Museum - Center for Contemporary Art in Vitoria-Gasteiz, and the Fine Art Museum in Bilbao have acquired the series of lithographies that we have printed at La Taller. The lithos are based on the drawings of mountain landscapes we produced while exploring military positions from the Spanish Civil War in Basque Country.

“Alemanen kanposantue” is colloquial Basque for “the graveyard of the Germans”. It is also the name given by locals to a memorial stele from the Spanish Civil War that stood forgotten and neglected by the side of a road in rural Basque Country, and into which once were engraved the names of three German soldiers who belonged to the Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe.

The surface of the monument has been chipped and damaged by years of vandalism and accumulating layers of political graffiti. We have made a sculptural reproduction of this surface, treating it as a palimpsest of all the informal attempts to dismantle and appropriate the ideologically laden object.

The sculpture is combined with a series of pencil drawings in which we map the “guilty landscape” that surrounds the stone, in a style that closely follows that of original military sketches of the front line during the war.

An ode to Rotterdam under lockdown. This movie is the result of a collaboration between Iratxe Jaio and her 11-year-old son Iñaki, who could not go to school for weeks because of the pandemic.