Iratxe Jaio + Klaas van Gorkum

“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.

We are participating in the 11th Art Biennial of Leandre Cristòfol in Centre d'Art La Panera, Lleida.

From 27 October until 29 December 2019
Opening: Sunday 27 October 12:00 - 15:00

Curated by: David Armengol, Cèlia del Diego and Julia Morandeira.

Artists: Mercedes Azpilicueta, David Bestué, Lúa Coderch, Joana Escoval, Ariadna Guiteras, Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum, Martin Llavaneras, Pere Llobera, La Más Bella, María Salgado, Mireia Sallarès and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.

La Taller opens the cultural season with a new exhibition format. From 11 to 20 October we will be working alongside with Maite Martínez de Arenaza on a series of lithographs, based on the drawings of mountain landscapes we produced this summer while exploring historical military positions in the Basque Country. At the same time we will display a sculpture based on the reproduction of a Nazi monument dedicated to three German soldiers from the infamous Condor Legion, that had been standing neglected beside a road in the countryside for all these years.