Gio bat-Bulegoa z/b. Manu Uranga

09:00 – 21:00 – Manu Uranga will be showing the audiovisual material Gio bat-Zabala and Gio bat-Txitxarro at Bulegoa z/b. The order of the videos reproduced in several TV monitors will change over a period of a day so that an edition can be made of the montage.

As a whole, the different parts that make up Manu Uranga’s Gio bat can be seen as a sequence. His work gains meaning in relation to space occupied through performative actions and sculptural materialisation. The spaces he stops at become sites for working in and attempting to place the temporal sequence of the project: to make a stop and understand it. The actual condition of the spaces he chooses is what generates the desire to follow the course of events and to believe in the process of cause and effect in the project.

Gio bat is conceived in such a way that its realisation will generate forms of flow and inertia in relation to a form of production which is inevitably affected by the relationship with the spaces it intervenes. The project thus analyses its own physical realisation through body and gesture, and material relationships to place through technological media and their dynamics; but also how this relationship forces us to reconsider the way this particular mechanism is presented. Focusing on the “object/mechanism in itself” leads to a more expressive, more static material relationship, whereas a focus on “the act of transformation” carried out on the mechanism or object makes this relationship more kinetic and transitive.

The mechanism, which starts functioning when the project is carried out by a group of people who move around a number of poles attached to the structure of a space, becomes material to be manipulated, a sort of prolongation of the body, allowing new ways of occupying space to come about in its “unfolding” and movement through the space.

Gio bat-Zabala (2 August 2013)
This first intervention vertebrates the project. Six aluminium tubes held within the structure of a space set off a mechanism for people to manipulate.

The physical position of the operators in relation to the tubes and their movement within the space generates forms of inertia and tensions recorded by cameras fixed to each of the poles during the intervention.

Gio bat-Txitxarro (7 June 2014)*
Second intervention in the project. An image is fragmented and saturated until it turns the dance floor into a single mass. The introduction of a device and the fact of placing it within a larger structure (the nightclub) influences the movement of people intervening in the space. Technical alterations, the way different bodies block each other from view and the way they move, generate a single image; a drawn out, concentrated view. A sort of sustained attention.

*Production of Gio bat- Txitxarro was supported by the Eremuak programme.

Manu Uranga (Zumaia, Gipuzkoa, 1980). His most recent works openly reflect on exploratory processes and the physical alteration of space in sculpture and through audiovisual language. Studied Fine Arts (2005) and a Masters in Art Research and Creation (UPV-EHU). Recent solo exhibitions: Decúbito manual (third and final part of the project Dos de Mayo 25. Bilbao), Barriek program, Sala Rekalde (Bilbao, 2013); Planos (second part), Torre de Ariz (Basauri, 2013), and Planta (first part), COAVN, Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos Vasco-Navarro (Bilbao, 2012). Published MLDJ with artists David Martínez Suárez, Jon Otamendi and Lorea Alfaro in 2012. He has taken part in different group activities and exhibitions and received a number of prizes and artist grants.