IN SILENT OBSERVATION, THE EYE THINKS Javier González De Durana 1. IMAGE OF THE CITY Jon Kortazar 2. THE SHAPES OF THE CITY Santos Zunzunegui 3. WANDERING Fernando Golvano 4. DON´T EVER SELL YOUR SHADOW María Eugenia Salaverri 5. FAMILY GROUPS Miguel González San Martín 6. THE CAPTIVATED LOOK Pedro Ugarte 7. PROLEGOMENA TO A STILL LIFE Anjel Lertxundi

IN SILENT OBSERVATION, THE EYE THINKS Javier González De Durana "The knowledge of cities is linked to the possibility of deciphering their dream images" Siegfried KRACAUER, 1931. The project 7 x 7 x 7 was conceived as a contribution of REKALDE Exhibition Hall to the celebrations of the seventh centenary of Bilbao's foundation and with the aim of offering a testimony of its urban and social reality through the photographic look of seven guest artists. Given the complex reality of a metropolis such as this one, especially at a time when deep transformations are taking place both in its visible urban reality and in the civic behaviour of its inhabitants, that testimony, sought and found, had to be by all means fragmentary. Sometimes, the partial vision of a fact is more truthful and eloquent than the apparently complete observation of it. Often, the simplest event hides mysterious or unnoticed aspects which we fail to perceive immediately or even in a long time. Therefore, to pretend to know or reveal everything about it is just vain arrogance or a plain lie with which maybe some intend to ignore bothersome realities or, still worse, realities whose existence they are unaware of. On the contrary, since each city is a whole made up of different cities and the unplanned result of successively planned events, the fragment, the partial look, the choice of a feature taken from the whole -even if it has been captured at random-, the fact that, from the outset, those artists do not even try to reflect the whole, offers credibility and makes us look more attentively. There may be something which, having attracted the attention of some unprejudiced eyes, might have passed unnoticed before the comfortable look of the rest and it could even happen that that particular, missing aspect was necessary for us to understand better what had been unintelligible or little clear until then. Like in the middle of the XIXth century, the person who lives in Bilbao or a similar metropolis is still nowadays, at the beginning of the third millennium, a passer-by, an individual who walks in streets taken by other subjects like himself, and who curiously looks at the changing reality of both. Amazed, astonished before the vigorous spectacle of a space in constant mutation, he is a nomad whose look catches fugacious human and material fragments of a world where he, in his turn, participates as a simple detail, ephemeral and volatile in the look of the others. That feeling of permanent, unapprehensible flow has grown so much recently that by now we have are fully persuaded that the reality of cities is inaccessible in itself and always mutating. We recognize it as a sum of personal experiences that coexist, each one in a particular segment, sometimes especially close to others, though maybe separated by a large emotional distance. We clearly perceive that there is not a unique, definite urban truth, but manifold realities resting on a dense weft of houses, streets, neighbourhoods, outskirts, places... all taken by individuals who, depending on where they are, behave and feel one way or other, generating countless situations. The disorderly growth of cities during the XXth century has dissolved the classical organization of spaces into public (civic street) and private (sheltering home), as well as the concepts of urban centre and periphery (through which the social stratification was regulated). This has been highly noticeable in Bilbao in the last 25 years, a lapse during which certain central areas of the city have been degraded physically and/or socially while some prestigious suburbs have grown under the metropolitan influence in the far off limes, with the inevitable sequel of services halfway between the centre and those expanded suburbs. Together with other factors typical of the economic and telematic growth, this unusual development has originated some hybrids which are nothing in particular, but "non-places", spaces for personal experience which have become more and more important in our lives: supermarkets, airports, petrol stations with fast-food restaurants, metropolitan terminals, huge malls... , they are all substituting the street as a public space. The street was a place for sociability, where one could be in spite of not having money, whereas those "non-places" are intended for brief customer transit, for consumption, as long as there is money to spend. Thus, the traditional city, characterized by dense personal relationships associated to stable settings, is being substituted little by little, by a neutral, transient urban space, prone to light contacts. In the city of information these places reveal themselves as conglomerations of signs, ephemeral devices, fugacious stories and fleeting memories (real and virtual)... in an ever growing number. Signs which take the hoardings, the industrial containers, the beaches of car parks, the hills of domestic waste, the dumps of objects which await their industrial recycling..., that is to say, the necessary neighbourhoods of the new meta-politan spaces. Summing up, this is a process that lessens the city and extends the deterritorialized spaces, by which I mean the urban landscapes where there is a loss of personal anchorage and identity of the place in favour of a global space, supposedly homogeneous, indistinct and virtual. As a consequence of those transformations which diminished the domestic character of the city, the urban passer-by of the XIXth century, who was a mere observer carried away by the amazement and the encounter, plunged into a feeling of uncertainty, typical of the explorer or the nomad. The street is no longer the extension of the corridor of the house, the café terrace is no longer the substitute of the windowed balcony which overlooks the street; the restaurant, an alternative to the homely dining-room; the office, a larger space than the study; and the cheerful neighbourhood, a palliative for the nuptial chamber. This order has been disrupted and the individual is afraid because he has lost his way and feels unable to orient himself in his surroundings. While the real maps soon become useless -nothing remains-, the symbolic maps of the city become uncertain, as they do not describe clear emotional situations any longer. The hostility with which the symbols are manipulated causes a dramatic disorientation and the loss of one's bearings. Like an explorer, the citizen is nowadays trying to adjust the space he takes and lives to some descriptive model of the city, thus drawing a cartography of his own using the coordinates of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. In the last two decades, few cities like Bilbao have witnessed such an intense process of loss, transformation, creation and substitution of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. A deep catharsis has led to the moulting and the renovation of certain vital organs, so we guess that the old saying that assured that all solid bodies vanish in the air is still fully valid. The question now is whether the change of the appearances and the emblems will uproot the minds, if the real body will still be the same and if the genius of the place will go dumb. For each single individual, the urban realities that count are the concrete personal situations; all the rest, what is shown in the statistics, is the domain of some bureaucrat politicians who pretend to ignore the uncertainties of their territory , the vulnerability of the public space, the lack of sentimental maps, and the fact the cities are prone to poetic and historic mutability, originating something which is not a mere urban shape. The city, a space for confusion, is felt by the people who use it as a system where the intervening factors include physical aspects -demography, economy, culture...- and structural events -means of transport, energy, financial movements...- which shape an objective reality that gets all mixed up in the individual perception with a subjective reality sprinkled with chancy, irregular and irrational ingredients. Needless to say, urban time has also changed. The way we look and perceive (we'd rather say 'consume') is instantaneous. The passing of time does not leave any traces on a memory devoid of the coating left behind by the past times (whether near or remote, it is the same), which has been substituted by bright neon lights and appealing electronic adverts. History and instant have become more or less the same and the fact that everything before our eyes is always rushing makes us think through images rather than through ideas. Both perception and memory suffocate under the avalanche of a collage made up of immaterial elements, among which no shape or situation stands out clearly. Between the collapse of banal, aesthetizing images (obliging virtual reality) and sheer reality there is a concealing effect (screen) that dissolves the limits of sensible perception, giving rise to an aesthetic feeling of disappearance , caused by the instability of the images, the spaces and the objects, whose duration and presence is neither permanent nor absolute. Everyday life has been colonized by the performance of a reductionist culture which praises the loss of the senses and manages to sneak into the private home. The spectator does not really live because he is subdued by a fiction of endless consumption capacity within grounds, close to pain, shaped by some infamous architecture that considers space a product for trade. The silence of the speech is underlined by all that noise and visual mobility; the apparent disorder -strange paradox- is as intense as the proliferation of new instruments to order and control both the streets and the "explorers" who try to overcome these besieging circumstances . No matter how contradictory it might seem, it is seduction that makes all of this possible. The power which dominates reality becomes noticeable in the symbolic world by means of certain seduction strategies, whose ability consists in subverting, as if it were a game, the profundity and solidity of any other powers, like the power of reality and truth or the power of psychology, making every sign, urban or of a different nature, show its opposite face, its reversibility. The architecture, the city and its inhabitants do not escape the failure of reality and of the matter and the triumph of the imaginary and the immaterial. In fact, they are, we are, the direct result of those replacements which, in fact, constitute the essential characteristics of the contemporary mass media culture presented with a global and diffuse aesthetization wrapping that has expanded, as if it were a beautiful make-up, all over the planet. The contents, the qualities, the places are substituted by the superficiality, the attractiveness and the devices; the experience of the real by perceptive manipulation. The institution of spaces is mistaken for the installation of atmospheres which provide "experiences" for perception that are only completed later, when they are "interpreted" and so given a "meaning" . The real is reduced to its image and we hear about the dramatization of existence as if it were a show in which people were the actors. It would all just be a show, a drama, an image, mere tricks after all. The widespread aesthetization process taking place in electronic communication is provoking the abolition of the singular aesthetic experience and, with it, of the individual conscience. Bilbao is the protagonist city in this photographic exhibition, where it shows some of the features of its many-sided urban and human face. Seven photographers have been invited to look at it though seven different types of conceptually pre-determined images, and the result is certainly amazing on account of the decisions made by the artists when they chose what to look at in the city. Two of the artists come from Bilbao and, therefore, they know well what is on the other side of the camera, as they have lived with it. Another one had already worked on such a decisive aspect of Bilbao's life as its river, which is like knowing its essence. Most of them, however, had never been to the city of the Nervión before and, therefore, their looks are free from prejudices or preferences, from positive charges towards this or that or negative connotations towards what is here or there. This photographic exhibition develops the idea of a polyhedric Bilbao whose diversity is captured through looks that range from the landscape and panoramic view to the contemplation of the minute detail typical of the still life, in the room of a private house, including other five images which, like a zoom, go from the general to the particular. Playing with the number "seven", which alludes to the seven hundredth anniversary of the city, seven artists have taken each, seven photographs of Bilbao, gathering the following seven genres: (1) The landscape, Bilbao as a massive city connected to the natural environment where it lies (surrounded by a low mountain range), contemplated both from its slummy outskirts, the active or inactive subsidiary borders (roads, mining grounds...) and from more central settings which are in contact with urbanized natural vestiges (the river, landscaped or wild hillsides...). (2) The customs and social relationships, the life in one of Bilbao's neighbourhoods, the streets, the entertainment, the strolling and the spaces for leisure, the daily setting where existence flows. (3) The contemplation of a particular building, a house in a street in a neighbourhood in Bilbao, which represents the "spirit" of the place where it is, an emblem or a stigma for its inhabitants or users or, in other cases (the empty site and the industrial ruin), for its displaced occupants and excluded users. (4) The frontier between the public and the private, the division between the outside (the street, the yard or the terrace) and the inside (the entrance hall, the room or the car), the spaces for communication and/or separation where the private self and the social self unfold. (5) The personal relationships within the community, a group portrait, the meeting of several people who belong to a certain human group in Bilbao (family, couple, friends, colleagues...), (6) The portrait, the individual face of a particular subject who lives in Bilbao (pregnant women, babies, men and women, even some anti-portraits), personalizing the multiple, singularizing human diversity, and (7) The still life, i.e., a meaningful collection of organic and inorganic objects situated somewhere in Bilbao. There is a continuum from the general view to the look over certain concrete objects, as if the whole were a set of Russian "matruskas", those dolls which enclose an identical, smaller doll inside. The difference would be that the photographs of each sequence do not enclose identical though smaller shots, but images which become more and more local and concrete, more and more human and personal. We could say that each photographic look contains countless possible partial looks, among which one is chosen for the next sequence, which contains in its turn, countless possible partial looks, among which one is chosen, the following... and so forth. Thus, moving from the particular to the panoramic, the still life in photograph number 7 would belong to the collection of objects owned by the individual portrayed in the sixth image who, in his turn, belongs to the group we can see in photograph number 5, some of whose members might live or work or move in that house or shop or car or transit, borderline area between the private and the public we can observe in the fourth image, and whose house could be the one in photograph number 3, situated in the neighbourhood we can contemplate in the second image of that city -Bilbao-, lying along the valley showed in photograph number 1. The chaining of photographs in a linear sequence (i.e., the fact that the objects in the still life belong to the person portrayed, etc.) is real in some cases and fictitious but likely in others. The person who looks at each series can reconstruct a story in which each image would be a chapter, establish relationships between the photographs or create a narration more or less close to reality, even if this is not what really matters. Whether built on a real or a fictitious basis, each story elaborated by each spectator is genuine. Once more, the observator completes the work of art when he gives it his personal mark. The artists made their decisions after having known the city for several days and having walked over its central areas and remote ends. Without conditions, directions or recommendations. Free decisions. In most cases they did not know what was exactly what they were photographing, where it came from or its foreseeable destiny, what the neighbours thought of it or how the object they were contemplating through the lens had become what it was. However, in silent observation, the eye thinks. What is most appealing about this photographic result is to see that none of the artists seems interested in the great architectural projects of Bilbao, in its future areas of expansion and development, of social dynamism (apparently) projected towards the future, towards the revival, the renewal, the new challenges, the new customs which foreshadow the achievements to come... On the contrary, the artists' attention has focused on old peripheral neighbourhoods like Olabeaga where, in spite of the decadence, life still goes on (Tony Catany); the banks of Olabeaga, Zorroza and Deusto, where the docks of the old shipyards have been recovered as spaces for urban leisure and the ruins of solid industrial warehouses await to be rehabilitated (Humberto Rivas); Bilbao La Vieja with its pits like concrete mouths leading to tunnels through which the worn out earth was disembowelled (Begoña Zubero)...; with their rosaries of pulled down factories, abandoned grounds and anonymous houses, these neighbourhoods offer, indeed, an image of disintegration. On the other hand, the Old Town, with its narrow arcades where a big dose of tolerance still makes new personal relationships possible (David Hilliard), represents the will to remain, whereas Begoña presents itself as the model of disintegration associated to the block of flats, collective, isolated, statistic, robotic and "modern". Pushed by the fever of speculation, this neighbourhood developed in an area opposite some factories which were pulled down some years ago, the site having become a park nowadays (Luis Palma). The only photographers who turned their gaze towards a different neighbourhood, El Ensanche, did it either from a conceptual point of view, representing it not as it really is but in the way its users' eyes see it (Joan Fontcuberta), or focusing on that ambiguous space (bridge, stations and railway tracks, sloping streets...) which stretches from Albia gardens in El Ensanche, to El Arenal gardens in the Old Town (Luis Izquierdo-Mosso). However, all these photographs, most of which were taken during the spring and summer of 1999, are major proofs of the speed at which Bilbao is changing . Some of the realities photographed then no longer exist. After many years standing as something definite and characterizing, they have become -like others are about to become- something different. This is what has happened to La Naja railway station and the railway tracks leading there, or to the mining grounds of Miravilla, all ripped open, and the old mining constructions which used to stand there. Before long, the banks of Olabeaga, Zorroza and Deusto will also be something different from what we now see. In fact, to photograph the present is to make archaeology of the present time. Almost all the images included in 7 x 7 x 7 are already memories of the past, held back fragments which belong to a fleeting present. The history of Bilbao, of any city, is a text we are forced to read and write once and once again, and in which we are also written. Each city is many cities. All the ones it used to be in the past lie buried under the present city, communicating with each other under our feet. In some cases, they are really buried and, from time to time, there appear some vestiges of what we used to be. We immediately recognize ourselves in them, even if it is five hundred years since we had news from them. In other cases there is an emotional burial and we inherit its weight in an invisible, though equally palpable way. We receive an inheritance of wills and renunciations, of aspirations and refusals, which shapes the unique features of our sentimental behaviour. Italo Calvino claimed that it was useless to classify cities as happy or unhappy since these two words, applied to any city, lack meaning, and he proposed classifying them taking other qualities as a basis: "those which throughout the years and the mutations still forge the wishes and those in which the wishes either manage to erase the city or are erased by it" . Under the asphalt of our streets do not only lie the remains of the past we used to be. There also lies the future we will be, before becoming -of course- another archaic vestige. Under the Bilbao observed by the modern "flaneur", far beyond the one we have photographed, buried under the mud and the slime, there is a Bilbao we cannot see but which moulds our character. A wired city, crossed by tunnels and communication nets, energy, water, sewers and parkings. Sometimes -strange paradox- under a ruined industrial neighbourhood of the XIXth century runs the vibrant, light, translucent, present day optic fibre that looks into the future and enables us to communicate with the opposite side of the planet in half a second; whereas, next to the modern building whose architecture astonishes the whole world, a shaky drainage net built by our great grand-parents survives unable to drain properly into the river the rainwater which falls only some metres further up. Paraphrasing the Shakespearean text, we can imagine that cities are made of the same matter dreams are made of, and that our short life is just a pause between two nights or between two cities, the tangible one and the desired one. The future is a hypothesis floating in a dense mist. The cities are past. That is their reality. The inhabitants of the cities have many lives behind them. Those lives, the shapes of their desires, are their realities. What can be photographed lies in those physical and emotional truths which, like dream images arranged for us to decipher, have been brought from a past built and lived... throughout 700 years. 1. Marc Augé, Los no lugares. Espacios del anonimato. Una antropología de la sobremodernidad, Barcelona, Gedisa, 1995; also by the same author, "Lugares y no lugares de la ciudad", published in Desde la ciudad, in the IV Summer University Courses Arte y Naturaleza. Actas. Huesca, 1998, pages 235-248. 2. Paul Virilio, Essai sur l'insecurité du territoire, Paris, Stock, 1976. 3. Paul Virilio, Estética de la desaparición, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1988. 4. "The media confinement is double-sided. On the one hand, there is the kidnapped, the packaged reality; on the other hand, the existence enclosed in minute cells of architectural and urbanistic survival. Both moments define the contemporary electronic mass: the besieged modern condition", Eduardo Subirats, "La condición sitiada" in La Linterna Mágica. Vanguardia, Media y Cultura tardomoderna, Madrid, Siruela, 1997, pages 171-174. 5. Angelique Trachana, "El carácter femenino de la arquitectura. Poesía y seducción", in ASTRÁGALO. Cultura de la Arquitectura y la Ciudad, nº 5, Madrid, November 1996, p.XCIX; monograph dedicated to "Space and genre. Journeys to paradise". Also, Jean Braudrillard, De la seducción, Madrid, Cátedra, 1989. 6. About the effect of speed on contemporary societies, see the dossier "Un mundo veloz", in LETRA INTERNACIONAL, nº 39, July-August 1995, including articles by Paul Virilio, Noni Benegas, Sergio Olivari, Mario Merlino and Wilhelm Klauser, among others. 7. Las ciudades invisibles, Minotauro, Barcelona, 1983, "Las ciudades tenues.2.", pages 46-47. 1. IMAGE OF THE CITY Jon Kortazar I The first image of the city is the one which is perceived through the amazed glance. The city inaugurates a new way of looking. It is the first step. A new kind of town planning creates a new light and a new look which have nothing to do with looking at the open country or the mountain. The horizontal fullness of the morning, which opens little by little through the mist, does not exist any more. Now the light falls from the sky over a grid of houses and streets. The horizon has changed, we contemplate a "vertical horizon", no matter how absurd this might seem. This is what the XIXth century writers could see in Paris, creating perhaps the first capital city of the world, in both a chronological and a metaphorical sense. The city creates a new look and creates a new subject: the stroller, the man who does not act but contemplates, who turns contemplation into action. Baudelaire is carried away with the city and contemplates a changing world in order to later realize that the city draws with its strokes, the outlines of a face, the face of the modern man who reveals itself in the look, who appears in the centre of some social relationships, in the centre of a net that creates his personality. Walter Benjamin also meditated upon Paris only to realise that the city thought by him offered enough traces so as to detect a new social order. Town planning, architecture and anthropology melted into a single art, the art of laying out streets, of designing houses, of weaving and unweaving a complex space which would be inhabited by the citizen, the new man of the new political order, who pursued his raison d'être in the Greek city. We look as if we had created the light, but we only create a look. II The second image is a multiple image; it is the creation of shadows which we call anonymity or loneliness, but which could also be called solidarity. In the city everything is two-faced. The city weaves and unweaves the lives of its inhabitants. It glides over them as if it were an uncontrolled order. The city is said to offer the possibility of being anonymous, that is to say, of being free, and also the feeling of loneliness which comes from the fact that you are nobody in a city. The anonymity contributes to a sensation of freedom. The citizen can no longer control the society around him. Among peers he can go unnoticed, he can disappear and, at the same time he can be himself, free from (some) social ties and, of course, free from more traditional restrictions. The anonymity enhances both privacy and variety. Rimbaud wrote that "he was another", that within the same personality there was room for several personalities. But only in a city can the different personalities become manifest because the mobility contributes to such variety; each of us appears to be different in different circumstances and what could otherwise be called hypocrisy is just a form of change, of adaptation to the environment. Environment is a word that helps us distinguish another image of the city, as the city is not a space for the individual but for the community that creates the history, so to speak. It is a meeting point for different interests and a multiple net of multiple interventions, of daily lives that come together in the urban space while differing on their views of life. In the era of crossbreeding, the city provides support for diversity. The city is in permanent conflict because its time is not cyclical, but continuously moving towards the creation of an appropriate setting for a plural, changeable coexistence. Its time is the time of history, not the time of myth, which prefers to look itself in a mirror that reflects an image which dreams motionless. III I like to think that the city is a labyrinth. I conceive the city as a double lane: one leading our daily lives along a fixed, repeated route, from home to work, whereas the other lane is walked by the stroller who discovers things that he has not seen before, like the swimmer, who never bathes twice in the same water. I like to think of the labyrinth as the work of a lesser god who wants to restrain the daily conflict of the cities, who intends to establish an order for so many different people come from so many different places. But such superior order will never exist in a city, because the labyrinth does not lie in the space but in the mess created by the relationships among its inhabitants. And that mess makes me see the city as a space where the unwanted consequences of all human projects show up. Every good intention hides an unwanted consequence which will emerge in the course of time. Every labyrinth has corners where the Minotaur will appear. 2. THE SHAPES OF THE CITY Santos Zunzunegui This city, which I believed to be my past, Is my future, my present. J.L.B. You arrange on the floor the photos which have been put in your hands as if they were pieces of a puzzle whose pattern is unknown to you. Scattered, aleatorily displayed on the carpet, they seem to be the ruins of a map torn to pieces (or, perhaps, the remains of a magic mirror?), inhabited not even by animals or beggars, but by spirits swarming over ghastly passages which, invisible, weave a net of secret correspondences and links between the images. You modify this array once and once again seeking, when the kaleidoscope has ceased rotating, the emergence of a design which will give you the arcane clue, the hidden key that will open the way towards the meaning which is supposed to underlie those photographs. The meaning that will weld, once and for all, the fragments into which the city (your city) seems to have shattered and which you would like to recompose whatever the cost. Meanwhile, driven by an inexplicable need, you open the bulky dictionary you frequently use to look for the sleeping stories and little dramas which crouch behind the wisely ordered words. You look up the word "neighbourhood", one which you necessarily have to consider when you are faced with the images of the city (your city). The etymology, the meanings, everything leads you towards crossbred territories of porous boundaries, of fluctuating limits, of moving borders, constructed with the promise that crossing them will be even more pleasurable than the melancholic permanence inside a precinct outside which there was no health. Then you remember when many years ago, you timidly risked to trespass the blurry borders that shaped the space of your dailiness and entered, going beyond the limits of your neighbourhood, diverse territories of doubtful geography where everything seemed positively different. Where beings and things melted together in the dark amalgam of streets whose beauty was seen by no-one: river banks inhabited by factories which are now ruined, steep hills that sheltered old cemeteries no longer used, old mountains pierced by ruined galleries whose pitheads emerged like silent screams among the sparse vegetation of the slag, mazes of streets and intersections weaving the tow of a town whose bridges over the river had served long ago the purpose of expanding the growing city (your city) over primitive vegetable gardens and paths. When you turn to the photographs again, your perception has changed. You must admit that the shapes of a city are just the shapes of the memory. You must acknowledge that a city (your city) is not only the result of geographical contingencies but also the place where different layers of detritus have settled forming contradictory memories which have only left ephemeral traces, vestiges trapped inside some photographs. These photographs clearly point at current events but at the same time, they summon the shadows of the past in different ways. Through the dim light which seems to reflect the sleepiness of a cataleptic city that awaits to be woken up from a nightmare of decadence and extinction. But also by fixing those spaces where time has deposited, as in a palimpsest, superposed sediments which are inhabited by fossil shapes in unsteady balance, stranded in the banks of a lean river (knife of water and mud) furnished with arrogant buildings which were old even before existing. Or by immobilising those urban spaces which are sometimes bathed in gasthly colours and sometimes observed from manifold viewpoints so as to apprehend in a peculiar way the irreducible heterogeneity of the identical. For the first time you are in a position to understand real meaning of the experience proposed by the images you are trying to decipher. In order to do it you must give up the impossible synthesis and admit, once and for all, that a city (your city) is, like the neighbourhoods that make it up, a territory undergoing unceasing metamorphoses, tireless mutations that can only find a feigned rest in the snapshots offered by a mechanical eye. Thus, in the same way as the neighbourhoods organize the city's framework and keep an eye on each other or turn their backs on one another in an arrogant gesture of tribal identity, the photographs of the city (your city), in their radical independence, constitute an imaginary geography where there is room for the original vision of the mindful spectator, capable of moving from one to the other in endless fluctuation. This is exactly the power of photography. To look at the present and see the past. But it is also a privileged way of recognising, in the undeniable presence of the actual, the emergence of a virtual reality which only reveals itself before the impassive eye of the camera. To photograph a city (your city), now you see it, is to construct an imago mentalis rather than to carry out a land survey, it is not to portray it with impossible realism but rather to build an imaginary theatre where everyday is renewed, for each eye willing to see, as Barthes said, obstinately, the unfathomable mystery of personal experience. This is the magic of the images which in a sort of fascinating oxymoron make us face the invisible through the visible. 3. WANDERING Fernando Golvano Wandering is a way of thinking. Wandering in Bilbao is a way of semiotic exploration, without a definite programme, open to the disparate happenings of its life worlds, of its shapeless or orderly topography and of its heterogeneous and at the same time amazing architecture. Sometimes I have got lost , as in a labyrinth, in its activity of modest metropolis, but a metropolis after all, with all the more reason since the underground or metro was built. Yes, it is the only Basque city that allows an experience of that kind. Its hectic activity, its inconveniences, its anonymous interaction, its prolonged industrial and financial activity, its neighbourhoods darkened by the uncertainty and the unfulfilled dreams, its proud enlargement of bourgeois origin, its spectacular urban regeneration, and so many stories unfolding under the words: I might come across any of this. What would happen if I decided to stay and live in Bilbao? This is a recurring question, which reveals the indescribable attraction caused by this city to someone coming from San Sebastián. Through my wanderings I have been weaving a memory of likes and dislikes for the thousand faces of this convulsing city which still offers beautiful examples of industrial architecture as well as magnificent instances of rationalist buildings and eclectic ones. Nevertheless, some areas are undeniably ugly, and this can hardly be concealed by the mist, when it emerges, or the smog. Infamous architecture which sticks to the hillsides, homes full of hardships which collide with the kind existence of other neighbourhoods or with the more recent architecture of international prestige, which has become an identifying emblem projected to the future. The images captured by these seven artists allow me to set out on other openings or crossings of this river-sign world called Bilbao. They make up a fragmentary map of specific architectures that captivate my look for several reasons. These photographs harmonize to some extent the double nature that characterizes contemporary photographic practice, which, on the one hand, longs to hold an artistic rank that claims, in its turn, for aesthetic perception -creating affections and intensities, often of an ineffable nature- and, on the other hand, shows its determination to be documentary -as stated in the matter-of-factness of the photographic image, which registers the specific traces of reality. The fact that this has been, the unrepeatable mark left behind by space and time, modulated by the singular choice of each photographer, incorporates another imaginary to the city, other driftings of a symbolic heritage which we can also share. Few cities are as attractive as Bilbao to make a record of places crammed with entropies, with signs left by the time gone by, the present and even the future. It is well known that photography is closely linked to the memory and to melancholy -thinking of it not as a dark, paralysing passion but as a maker of re-creations and second readings-, so when I see these images, I cannot avoid interpreting them also as cultural documents through which I can embark upon another wandering, connecting times, meanings and affections. Far from the sort of photographic truth postulated by Henri Cartier-Bresson as a "decisive moment", the images taken by Toni Catany, Joan Fontcuberta, David Hilliard, Luis Izquierdo-Mosso, Luis Palma, Humberto Rivas and Begoña Zubero seem to be closer to an aesthetic treatise on the fraternal presence of the things, the buildings and the events. Each photograph may invite us to go beyond those presences and follow an unstable story of uncertain meanings, even though we know that we will fail to make sense of it, since there is not a univocal correspondence between the language of those images and reality. Thus, the images could also be approached as constructed, autonomous enigmatic images. Which experiences do they express? To which existential or fictional territories do they lead? It would be enough to answer: They lead us wherever we want to go with our inquisitive eagerness and our particular dictionary of the world, of photography or of Bilbao. Personally, I will just provide a sentence, an interstice, though it might be any other, for an unfinished dialogue. Thus, I am seduced by the expressive power of the industrial ruins, which appear to be monuments, and whose disturbing beauty is captured by Rivas; or Fontcuberta's mediating look which, through the History of Art, analytically focuses our attention on one of the most emblematic buildings of Bilbao's modernist enlargement, the Montero House; or the meticulous, direct approach, related to the new objectivity, established by Palma, who chooses the ordinary working class housing architecture of the sixties and the seventies; or the amazement produced by the ghostly image of the Town Hall, as portrayed by Izquierdo-Mosso; or the rough urban corner of blind façades, impossible to locate, anonymous for everyone except its neighbours and some graffiti artists, and which is made visible by Catany´s shot; or the semiotic interaction activated by Hilliard when he opposes two photographs in a compound image where the accidental and the substantial are related without hierarchy; and, finally, I am seduced by that astonishing building in Bilbao La Vieja, with that motley domestic banner shaken by the wind, and the presence, powerful and simple at the same time, of the notice announcing Bar Gaucho. All of it seems to allow multiple combinations of meanings, unexpected relationships and innumerable dispersions of the stereotyped image of this city, which will soon be seven centuries old. Bilbao, any city , does not constitute a synthesis of manifold wills but a crossroads of clashing aspirations and vital, economic and political courses which do not cease to metamorphose. These photographs constitute other unusual crossings, other calls to re-discover its complex everyday life, to recall, think and maybe dream of its human geography, its architectures, traces, social breaks, prodigies and paradoxes. Because, is there anything, whether cities or human ups and downs, which are not inevitably tied somehow to recognizable or anonymous paradoxes? My wanderings, which are also shaped by paradoxes, catch a glimpse of other landscapes, real or imaginary, of Bilbao, whose name evokes fewer and fewer reflections of rusty waters, cranes, chimneys and steel skies. Other reflections of wavy titanium and high towers, which will shelter economic and symbolic synergies of local and global scope, seem to exorcize very rapidly the crisis undergone by a mode of civilising development which phagocytes human, economic and ecological resources. What else... Without melancholy, with critical memory and hope. 4. DON´T EVER SELL YOUR SHADOW María Eugenia Salaverri In the beginning there was an eye. A tremendous eye, fixed, enormous, without eyelid or eyelashes, surrounded by a triangle that glimmered over the paper. It was God, as described in the catechism. Below him, Adam and Eve, their faces covered by shame, fled an already lost paradise towards a cave where to hide, where to shelter themselves from the cold, the pests and, above all, from that staring eye that never closed. Thus, the home was invented. Thus intimacy was born. Several centuries and several sins later -when humanity had already learnt to call sins "mistakes" or "experience"- there came the stairs, the shutters, the curtains..., in short, the frontier between the public and the private, between you and me. This is a difficult frontier, a blurry one, indeed, raised to preserve secrets and to distinguish the desired company from the untimely meddling. A frontier established without words, even though many aphorisms have been written about it, like Pascal's, who claimed that "a man's misfortunes stem from not remaining quietly at home". There is something in that saying that makes us unconsciously agree, because all of us know the truth in it, the lot of bother and trouble caused just by our obsession to run away from home, to take the streets and get involved in other people's lives. However, the temptation to mix with the others, to look in their eyes as if they were mirrors, seeking in their reflection, the verification that we exist and have and identity, is too strong. "The eye you see is not an eye because you see it, it is an eye because it sees you", explained Machado. But, what does that eye which nobody looks, see? In other words, what does our face look like when nobody is looking at it? When we arrive home and remove our citizens' masks, the mask of a man or a woman, a worker, a mother, a lover, when there is only our bare face, without any make-up, do we still have the same face we have when we are being observed? Or are our features and our expression emptied, like a stone waiting for the sculptor -the others- to find its essence and its shape? Maybe it is that fear of the emptiness, the suspicion that when we are alone we lose our faces, that makes us go to the street, go down the stairs, reach the entrance and so feel relieved. And together with us, sewn to our feet, comes our shadow, the most private and personal territory we own, and the most public one too. The shadow, which does not exist until we are born, which cannot be exchanged with anyone´s, which comes with us until the end, more faithful than the best of couples, is at the same time, a visiting card that precedes and announces us, which often gives us away, tactlessly revealing that we are where we should not be, where perhaps we are not expected or even wanted. The greatest frontier between a man and the others is his shadow. Nothing is more valuable and nothing is so forgotten. Because, who thinks of it, ever? Who thanks it for its loyalty or reproaches it for its promiscuity when it gets entangled with other shadows? Poor, belittled shadow. A romantic author, Adalberto de Chamisso, dedicated it an odd but wonderful novel: "The man who sold his shadow". It tells the story of a young man who makes the terrible mistake of selling his shadow to the devil in exchange for inexhaustible amounts of gold. Unfortunately, he soon understands that the greatest wealth of all is to possess a shadow because, when people discover that he lacks one, everyone leaves him and he even loses his beloved because of a moonlight beam that reveals the truth. Dear friend, advises the protagonist at the end of the story, if you want to live among men, you´d better learn to honour your shadow first. Sensible advice. Let us honour our shadow, let us love the stairs that separate our home from the street, let us grease the shutters, let us iron the curtains, because they preserve us from being watched and observed against our will. Let us take good care of those beneficial objects because they also take care of us. As Calders said, "of the four wheels of the car, there was one rotating the wrong way. But that wheel turned out to be the good one, because it was trying to keep us away from the bend that broke us to pieces". Sometimes the frontiers are so thin, indeed, that they just seem to have the simple profile of an irony. 5. FAMILY GROUPS Miguel González San Martín "Family" is one of those words which, although apparently having an evident, particular sense, has, in fact, many meanings. It refers not only to kinship but also to people who live together under the same roof, whether they are relatives or not. Something "familiar" is something well-known, close, intimate, and "familiarity" indicates freedom of behaviour justified only by the closest relationship. From a strictly biological point of view, a family is a group of individuals who breed together in order to preserve the species. However, in the case of humans, it is also a construction of their minds, like people or nation, and the decision to stay together depends, therefore, on their will. It is said that a family is a human group that exchanges services, gifts, help and advice. But such reciprocity is not exclusive of relatives and does not demand living together. There is also familiarity with the group of friends or with those who share with us certain ideals and with our neighbours and colleagues. For the Christian morals, the family is the basis of society and the path that restrains concupiscence in order to have children for heaven. Maybe Saint Jerome went too far when he stated that "it is better to marry than to burn". From an hygienic point of view, a similar opinion was supported in 1902 by Balureaux, who thought that marriage was the safest protection against venereal contagion. Now, in the times of Aids, he would surely stick to this view, even with greater conviction. According to Freud, the family generates sexual alienation and neurosis which are not but the consequence of the distress produced by so many prohibitions. Reich defines it as a central reactionary cell, a factory of authoritative ideologies and conservative mental structures. Le Play thinks that the family mutilates its members, it makes them afraid, it castrates them. Engels states that it was created in order to preserve private property. In the family, the man would be the bourgeois and the woman the proletarian, an idea shared by radical feminism. There was a time, not long ago, when young people, imbued with these pessimistic visions or perhaps, out of sheer intuition, sought emancipation at an early age, proposing to found entirely free communities. Later, however, they founded traditional families. Maybe their feeling of guilt for not having dared or for having failed in the attempt, explains their weakness in bringing up their own children, who are not so anxious to leave the family home, where they have the status of detached and demanding guests. Most of us still live in families. Not all of them are ruined. According to the later statistics, ninety percent of the population get married, whereas the alternative groupings remain in the minority. There are fewer members in the family and what prevails is the nuclear, reduced family. There are even families with a single member, although this does not always respond to a voluntary decision, specially in the case of the elderly, for whom solitude -mainly if they are male- constitutes a serious pathology. There is a new component in the family, the television, an educating agent of the first order, which takes a preferential place in most homes and uninterruptedly transmits contradictory messages. In the XXth century the family delegated certain functions such as the education of the children or the care of the sick and the elderly, to the Protective State. The result is not very encouraging. School failure, the growing percentage of teachers suffering from nervous breakdowns, the brutality in the classrooms, the growing moral foolishness are all symptoms of what Félix de Azúa recently called the educational failure of wealthy societies: "The fact that the wealth of some nations does not diminish but, on the contrary, increases the cruelty, the selfishness and the wickedness usually attributed to extreme poverty is the most ominous enigma of this century". It seems that, unfortunately, those Krausist pedagogues of the XIXth century, who believed that the education of people would lead to wiser and therefore more righteous societies, were not right. At the same time, Auguste Comte attributed the crisis of the family to the weakening of the paternal authority and of the spirit of obedience. The care of the sick is delegated to the hospitals and old people are taken into homes. Their situation does not seem to have improved. On the contrary, sickness, old age and death have been shut away in white lazarettos so as to ignore their disturbing presence, their condition of premonitory mirrors. Old people prefer their own homes to those sinister places where, gathering on little chairs in front of a TV set, they are rushed into madness. And orphans cherish the dream to be adopted, the same as in Dickens' novels. The family is at crisis point, the same as ever. When we reach adolescence, our parents disappoint us and so we keep our distance. Our friends become then our adoptive family. We make our parents responsible for our frustrations, censors of our freedom. On becoming adults we start to forgive them, while we obstinately imitate their worst defects. Later, as they grow old, we treat them with contradictory paternalism and, finally, we miss them. 6. THE CAPTIVATED LOOK Pedro Ugarte The eyes that contemplate the city, day after day, between fleet blinkings, elaborate an endless succession of photographs throughout the years. These snapshots are not registered anywhere, excepting the imperfect files of our memory. They are impressions, more or less precise, and thanks to them the eyes can reinterpret that place where they open every day. Every face confronts the city, its complex scenery (the streets, the shops, the buildings, each marking their own rhythm of mutation and change), but they do not remain impassive before transformation. After all the faces also change (grow old) in accordance with the urban stage machinery where they tirelessly wink. There is something right in the centre of the pupils which belongs to the city, to that particular city where one lives. Above races, haircolours, even above the wounds and the marks left behind by life on a face, above all, there is always something, deep inside that look, which belongs to the city. In the same way as people change in the course of time, subject to the biological drifting of their own flesh and of their age, one might also reckon that the look changes in terms of what it looks. The one who writes this conceives Bilbao's buildings, its narrow streets, its winter greyish blue, as an unnecessary homeland, although this is also, in a way, the only homeland he has, the intimate homeland which he carries upon the shoulders of his conscience. Its flag has the indefinable colours that he has contemplated all his life. None of this can be indifferent to the work of the years upon the lines of a face. To look at the city means risking to be looked at, and feeling how space and time shape the different seasons of a long biography. And it cannot be denied that when we are defining our own identity, the place where everything has been happening, the way in which the city has been changing at the same time as us is very important. We could elaborate a theory based on that vague presentiment. I am afraid that the city modifies us and designs our features, the light or the darkness in our eyes, the colour of our skin, and the weariness or the joy that can be noticed in the corner of our lips. I am afraid that, in another city, we would grow old different. Cities are usually are usually portrayed by virtue of a handful of emblematic buildings. Nothing is further from their intimate truth. A city is shaped by its inhabitants, each human being who lives, suffers and works there. In fact, in our trips, we tend to accept that simple principle: people´s faces seem to be typical of a particular place. It is those faces that define the city and make it unique. We have been to many places that have ever since remained linked to the features, concrete and precise, of just one of its inhabitants. Time is in a hurry to get rid of us but, meanwhile, we can choose a place to stay (to stay forever), even knowing that it is impossible to fulfil this task. Sooner or later we choose that place. And then our eyes start getting used to it until we make it ours, and things will not happen in the same way any more, it is as if becoming a neighbour entailed a sort of aesthetic patriotism, of ornamental citizenship. Our look is finally captivated by a city´s dailiness, imprisoned by the routine of its parks, its signs and its sidewalks. The choice of a place to stay is also the choice of a particular way to grow old. And choosing that place, that place to stay, represents an aesthetic view, an exercise of will, taking the vows. No one deserves to die in a place other than the one which he has possessed in a most intimate and secret way. 7. PROLEGOMENA TO A STILL LIFE Anjel Lertxundi Nobody would take notice of the food and the objects arranged on a dirty table. The whole studio is a mess of pictures, stretchers, paintbrushes and paint cans, curtains and rolls of brown paper, coloured stains, easels of different sizes, art books and calendars of years gone by ... Suddenly, someone closes one, two, all the sources of light in the studio. There only remains open a small skylight through which, as if it were a half-open wound, the light flows focusing on the objects arranged on the table. The colours which are in the foreground spark off; the round shapes of the objects are outlined and emphasized, they slip away and disappear at the back so as to reveal, once completed, their textures and their shapes; the real time of the scene, which has been illuminated like this, lingers between the pleasurable instant of the foreground and the dark non-temporality of the background. It is on this particular place that the artist -photographer or painter, it is the same- has concentrated in order to make some glasses, two apples and a dead bird the centre of the world. The artist turns to nature in its most peaceful and inert state, it its still life, or as Spaniards say, not so successfully, in its death (the translation of still life into Spanish is dead nature). Our artist intends to rescue, not an example or an allegory, but the essence of the model. In order to do so, he has arranged the whole -particular place, precise source of light, objects of round shapes laid out on a table- in such a way that everything leads to discover the secret of light in the outlines that it creates, in the shine that it casts, in the new order that the artist would like to establish, aloof from mythology, from any possible meanings outside the picture or the photograph, from analogies and even from evocation. This zeal to focus on a single, futile, isolated cosmos reminds us of Prometheus: no-one can ignore his own circumstances. Obviously, the artist knows it. He also knew it when he only left open the tiny skylight of his studio. But if he is trying to concentrate now on an apple, on a piece of china, on a dead partridge, he is not doing it in order to keep up his technical skills. The strategy he wants to follow has nothing to do with a more or less mechanical succession of actions. The artist wants, in fact, to give an answer to the requirements of his poetics, and his probity forces him, beyond the public acknowledgement raised by his technique, to search for solutions to several formal problems which he has noticed and experienced in his professional career. In an old catalogue that he has just left on one of the rickety chairs of the studio, Heraclitus reminds him: "I will inquire into myself". Our artist looks at the quotation once and once again because it fills him with the emotion which overcame him years ago, when he had the chance to visit Giorgio Morandi's anthological exhibition in Bologna, which was announced in that old catalogue. Our artist contemplated in ecstasy the innumerable pictures with bottles, glasses, vases, plates or lamps which took up the exhibition hall. He imagined Morandi, a painter who had almost consecrated his life to the study of the reality of the object, repeating over and over again the same exercises, in winter and in summer, in sunny and cloudy days, some times at dawn, when the light was young, others at dusk, when the light was tiring out... Our artist -painter or photographer, it is the same- thought then that those exercises practised by Morandi over and over again could not be mere experiments with light and, in spite of the sarcastic Italian expression quadri di commestibili, did not correspond to a lesser art either. The artist caught a glimpse of it all in himself, in the emotion provoked by those pictures of trivial subject, though extraordinarily accomplished. Certainly, our artist had not often lived an emotion as thrilling as the one felt at Giorgio Morandi's exhibition, so he could not help wondering about the origin of his restlessness. Was it the indubitable technique of the Italian painter the cause of his emotional state? Or was it perhaps the poetical sobriety manifested in all his pictures? Was it the artistic mystery hidden behind the hardly noticeable variations which Morandi carried out throughout his life, using practically the same objects? Or maybe the boldness shown by this Bolognese artist on setting a distance from the avant-garde movements of the beginning of the XXth century in order to focus on the basic problems of his trade? Was it the call to meditate over some fundamental matters which he supposedly saw in his pictures? The restlessness led to a series of questions that made him clearly see that it is not the depurated technique of the still lives that raises the emotion, but the honesty of the artist, who, by questioning even the most basic facts of his trade, exposes himself, bare before us. Our artist understood that the artist should strive for sheer thought, for mere contemplation, for an absolutely quiet look. It was then that our artist understood that Caravaggio, Velázquez, Cezanne or Morandi had painted still lives to wonder, reflect, experience and run risks, and not to rest on the downy confidence of the already accomplished. Since that revelation took place, our artist has not looked for answers but for the best way to raise doubts about the vast field of action offered by the imitation of nature -from the faithful, plain reproduction of an object to its complete distortion-; about the possibilities offered by his technique to go from delicacy to brutality; about the mechanisms through which a picture or a photograph can cause joy, indifference, repulsion, enthusiasm, tenderness... That is why our artist -painter or photographer, it is the same- has closed all the sources of light in the studio. There only remains open a small skylight through which, as if it were a half-open wound, the light flows focusing on the objects arranged on the table. The colours which are in the foreground spark off; the round shapes of the objects are outlined and emphasized, they slip away and disappear at the back so as to reveal, once completed, their textures and their shapes; the real time of the scene, which has been illuminated like this, lingers between the pleasurable instant of the foreground and the dark non-temporality of the background.