- Beñat Achiary went to Barcelona with the Artze brothers to offer them a show, the txalaparta and the vocal improvisation were avant-garde, and not just a requirement for the acts. The slow car, the long road, the half-fitted chair, the sun on the forehead, and so he asked. “Joxean, what is tradition?”
The poet took a long time to respond because he was a friend of the aphorisms, and he responded like this. “Tradition is to remember. And what is remembering? To make present, to resuscitate.” Achiary has thus recognized his role as a smuggler, about tradition and vanguard Where is Lekeitio? Days.
It has been the antecedent of the Communication-incommunication exhibition, directed by Maddalen Lujanbio, Itxaro Borda and Xabier Erkizia. What can go wrong?
Exposure Communication-incommunication
Where: Tabakalera de Donostia
When: 28 May - 29 August
There are no clear answers, but surprises, yes, dozens. A performance by Bertolt Brecht at the Francoist Donostia in 1967? A dictionary of images? Meaningless poetry with prepositions in Spanish and random German words? Is a phone call to Laboa a poem? What does this makeshift concert of traditional instruments all over the world have to do with it? What do bird recordings do here? And can you see Axut by José Mari Zabala?
Random unions have an origin. The starting point of the exhibition is the experimental essays Lekeitio, which depart from the noises heard by Laboa in the rural district of Gardata, near Lekeitio, from the sounds of the Basque country and from the memories of the rage of war. Laboa, one of the most wonderful singers given by the Basque Country, did not make his most universal songs in Basque. Pieces formed by the sum of gutural, harmonious, afonic and challenged shouts, which can plunge the neighbour of Pune, Algeria or Lima over all languages.
Along with Laboa, in addition to Artze, Zabala and Zumeta, we find Zeruko Argia and Popular Radio, the theater group Jarraitu, Tarek Atoui, Pauline Oliveros, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, among others.
The exhibition shows the answers that have been moved within Achiary’s question. In short, we are aware that tradition and the avant-garde go hand in hand. As Arce said: “Even though the tradition is the oldest, because the tradition of a long time is even older than that first day, it is more modern than the new one, because it never ages.” Let us not confuse it with folklore. Much less with folklorism. Because it's the creation of tradition.