PROTOTIPOAK. INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL OF NEW ARTISTIC FORMS 2021
Prototipoak. International Biennial of New Artistic Forms showcases the projects developed over the past year at Azkuna Zentroa. Some of these projects will remain throughout the summer.
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Prototipoak is a Biennale that brings together artists with unique perspectives and diverse backgrounds, who propose new experiences rooted in the specificity of site and context. Through their uses of contemporary artistic forms, in various scenarios and formats – each with their own conventions and temporalities – they each question different aspects of reality and attempt to open up opportunities for transformation.
Prototipoak continues and expands upon the work achieved within 3, 2, 1. International Meeting of New Scenic Forms between 2013 and 2015. It was born in 2016 from a desire to explore the performativity and multiplicity of the social through art, and to critically contribute to shape it from a poetic, aesthetic and political perspective.
Since its inception, place has been a central element in the project, understood not only as the stage on which life unfolds – that is, as the container or context for action – but also as that which is constituted through the things we do, through our actions in context.
It is a place of complexity. A place in constant movement – where the normal, the marginal, the uncertain and mysterious, the absurd, the obvious, the uninspiring and the truly exceptional, the superfluous and the essential, all coexist.
At Prototipoak we pay special attention to the potential for interweaving, for entwining art projects with place, encouraging interactions and connections that transcend our own practices and those of the participating artists. The 2021 Biennale features creators Sra. Polaroiska, José Ramón Ais, Diego Sologuren & Sébastien Tripod, Maider López, Laida Lertxundi & Ren Ebel, Elssie Ansareo, Elena Aitzkoa and Amalia Fernández.
During the first week of June we will be celebrating Prototipoak. International Biennial of New Artistic Forms. It will be the time for artists, people who have worked on the different projects, and the public, to meet through the proposals made in this edition by these creators, who share diverse views, sensibilities and practices.
Prototipoak started months ago, even over a year ago, when we held the first conversations with this group of artists to invite them to start a creative process which, through its development and future echoes, we hope will generate relationships, knowledge, memories, experiences…
During this time, we have been taking part and becoming involved in the development of their ideas and the changing life of their projects, making an effort to foster a work environment with uncertainty and from uncertainty, for the Prototype to be a common exploration based on creation, management, production and communication, to generate exceptional crossovers. In this sense, we propose Prototipoak from the overflow of artistic practices, for it is not possible to separate creation from what is vital or from what is happening in the lives of the creators, of those of us who take part in these processes, and of those who, from now on, will be coming face to face with these projects. The aim of this Biennial is to be a shared field of experimentation, where artistic practices become a way of being-doing-thinking that transforms us and, at the same time, returns us to a transformed reality.
All projects start from highly intimate impulses and needs. They are proposals with which artists place themselves, and invite us to place ourselves, in a sensitive relationship with the world, based on empathy, wonder, curiosity, exile, unease, desire, sensorial, etc. They are works that go beyond disciplines, expanding or smudging the limits of what we do, opening up spaces where brambles, what happens at home, speleology, singing, architecture, gardening, film, friendship, street life, poetry, mountains, lakes and legendary travels, come together evidencing the ambivalence and complexity of the world. In some cases, Prototipoak acts as a framework to reconfigure proposals that are already in progress at the Centre. In others, it is the starting point for processes that will continue to be active and whose future is unpredictable.
What is taking place at the Centre these days is an encounter of all these artistic proposals in one same venue. The poetic proposals will meddle and entwine in our daily life from different imaginaria, transforming the life of the Centre, occupying interstices and strange places, and fostering other ways of using and imagining spaces, helping us to rethink and recompose what we do and what we are.
We hope that these works, which are small new versions of parts of reality, leave sediments or particles floating around in our imagination and our chores. Let us hope that forests and gardens grow on rooftops, buildings become porous to other lives, and streets are more friendly to the living…
Let us hope that this is a seed to sow a project for the city and that this encounter will expand beyond Azkuna Zentroa to museums, theatres, associations, neighbourhoods, etc. Hopefully, we will come to assume artistic emergency in multiple fields and within a culture of symbiosis, which would be meaningless to segment today.
Curated by Fernando Pérez and Rosa Casado
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