You are an artist and artistic researcher, but you always stress that you have not studied Fine Arts.
That's right. When I was 18, I didn't really know what to study. Philosophy, medicine, environmental sciences, audiovisual communication... I had a great mix of shit in my head! When I got the grade, I realized that medicine or audiovisual communication was to study, and I chose the last one. I've always liked to go with the camera, and that's why. The course was not as expected and at the end of the studies I went to Madrid. That's where I started the real learning process. I was there for eight years. I worked in a number of producers. He made 4 heads, Warner Bros. -- video pieces for them. And there I started working around video creation, looking for my own pieces and my own practices. My voice through video. Not so much from the communicative point of view, but more from the artistic point of view. I went to abstraction. And I realized that my starting point was always sound.

Did sound bring him into the art world, therefore?
I wanted to train myself in that video creation that started with sound. To do this, at the age of 30, I decided to do a master's degree in fine arts. I went back to Bilbao and then I first applied for the Fine Arts School. I really liked the master and it made me very short! I decided that I wanted to continue in that area, creating and researching, and then the path was to make the thesis. No scholarship, of course, because I was too old to receive grants, but I worked in the Euskaltegi during the thesis, and so I started.

Then he met the accusatory.
That's right. Philosophy has always loved it so much. The spirit of having learned the audiovisual communication that I had inside me, to the detriment of Philosophy, and while I was doing the thesis I began to read the philosophical texts. I was looking for concepts related to sound, and I came across the acousmatic. And I realized that that concept served me to do research and create at the same time. It all made sense to me. In the 1980s, several researchers researching sound art recovered the concept of acousmatic since ancient Greece. The concept was used by Pythagoras. It is said that the philosopher gave classes to his students by putting themselves behind a curtain so that their presence would not disturb him from the content of his readings. In these conditions, I intended that the students' attention should necessarily be directed towards the voice, towards the sound, to increase the sense of hearing. These sound artists wanted to refocus attention on sound. Not the origin of sound. Because we always think that sound is something, unintentionally. This sound is... Barking sound of a dog. Voice sound of a person. Sound of a car, rain. These artists wanted the sound to differ from its origin, and the sound itself to have its own character. And that path interested me both for research and for creativity.

Why is sound so appealing to one or the other?
I'm interested because it's not a material thing. Because it's not a certain body. It can't be more abstract. And that has great potential. When we hear a sound, our subjectivity generates images and bodies. Each one of them is his own. The abstraction of sound opens the door to these representations. Painting and sculpture also create images in us, and each one of us will understand it in its own way, but sound, because we don't have any material or visual supports, leads us to see what's inside us. Sound is an area of freedom.

So I'm interested in the action of listening and the processes of creation and subjectivations of mental sound images that emerge from the lack of image. In the thesis, I studied, for example, some listening sessions. People had to listen and describe some sounds. First from the purely aesthetic part: timbre, harmony, rhythm... But also from the anesthetic side, that is, from their perception. What caused them that sound, what image made them see ... And it's amazing how the subjective exercise of listening is also socially built. The research showed that they didn't hear the same sound musicians, artists, educators, doctors, etc. Everyone would listen to it in their own way, but, according to all appearances, everyday practices influence the way we listen and analyze sounds.

Then there's the theme of sound and technology. Through today's technologies,
we continuously create acoustic sound fields. Technology is increasingly developed and users do not know what happens inside it. We know that somehow sound is introduced into one device and then it comes out of another, but we don't understand everything that's involved, we don't know. It's a black box. We hear what we hear behind a kind of Pythagorean curtain. So I'm interested in technology. This black box allows us to put upside down some of the power relations that exist in society. This is, for example, the basis of cyberfeminism.

Cyberfeminism emerged in the 1990s, with the development of feminist practices and theories also in the field of technology. And that is that technologies have an enormous potential, precisely because they are a black box, to break with some prevailing dichotomies: nature/culture, woman/man, analogue/digital, physics/virtual... Current technologies allow to question these rigid limits. They allow us to fight from the private sphere, which is the public sphere, to create new identities, dismantle them and rebuild them. In cyberspace, that is, in our cyberlogos, we invent new ways of being, alter ego, nicks, from which we can create new realities.

And in art? How do you use it to create sound? The
intangibility of sound, the virtuality, also gives it a suggestive ability to create art. It has no materiality, but sound is the first material for my creation. I like to record sounds. I know how many folders I will have on my computer's hard drive! Then I use each other not. But it's kind of my intimate documentation, and I like the same exercise as pick-up. Sometimes I adapt those sounds, I make a sound synthesis, or not… Other times I pass the sound itself to the audiovisual format, or I turn it into an image… When I start I don’t know how I will end. Many times, in addition, I do not work alone, but with a colleague. Therefore, my creative process is the sum of many elements and the translation exercise.

He has participated in several exhibitions relating sound and image.
We were invited to participate in the Medialab platform of Tabakalera and the experimental creator and luthier Jonathan García Lana Tunipanea. Hence came the work of Forced Mechanics. We created a piece during the stay, a video installation, but it was basically the result of the hybridization of both disciplines. I created a video that visualized organic visual content and body movements, and Tunipanea, using software, turned recorded movements into sheet music, using music, mechanical parts of an old piano.

In just one rumor, I formed four accumographies, drawings with an opposite direction to a musical score. After composing the sound, the sound passed through a software, selecting the parameters to convert the sound into an image. In this way, sound was converted into image to try to reflect the discussions between sound and meaning.
But sound can still be used in a thousand ways. Through sound, space is acquired, literally.

This has to explain to me... In my
research activity I am studying the relationship between sounds and spaces. I cannot fail to combine the two. It is always said that a space has its own sound and that a sound creates a space of its own. And that's right. A sound is different in one place or another. And space can also be transformed by a sound. And this allows us to generate transformation processes through sound art.

I am particularly interested in sound interventions, for example. From Susan Phillipsz or Janet Cardiff to the musician I've discovered the Perila that I've discovered lately. Not far away, Mikel R. I am struck by the sensitivity to listening that the Donostiarra artist Nieto has, and I like how he guides that special way of listening to his own sound practice. In recent years, Nieto himself collaborates with the dancer Jone San Martin in researching the sound proposals that occur on the road from sound to body. And in the opposite direction. You hear not only your ears, but your whole body. And through sound, you can take space. Take and transform.

They did so also with the Artiatx space, took it and transformed it. How did the idea of turning this old factory into an artistic space come about?
It was all a joke. Irati Urrestarazu, another artist and I, were working on a studio in the San Francisco neighborhood. But it was very small, very expensive, there was a lot of moisture there -- and we started looking for another place. And all of a sudden we saw on a secondhand website selling objects on the internet that someone wanted to rent a place, in Zorrozaurre. We went there, we were taught an ugly place and we didn't. The owner then told us that he had another place on top that he did not originally intend to rent. And it was the former Artiach factory. It is a building with a large presence. Located in the Bank of Deusto, you can see perfectly what the original cookie factory was like. Where was the production, where were the offices… It's very nice. And we thought, "We're going to take it." We talked to the owner and eventually left us at a very good price in exchange for cleaning and caring. So we were joined by Javi Arbizu.

The initial intention was that all three of them would have a space for the creative works of our art. Of course, the first year we spent cleaning and conditioning space. And as time went by, and as space was being arranged, the other two of them came up with creating a space for stays and exhibitions beyond a study. Think and do. We entered January 2019 and the first exhibition took place in July 2020.

In recent years, therefore, we are working at the police station. We are preparing a sound intervention, and I am very interested in what the invited artists propose. How they understand space and how they can create another space within it with the sounds they propose. The objective is to turn the building into a resonance box of the different artistic disciplines.

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Sound art
"I don't like categorizations, nothing. Not yet. What is sound art? Our discipline has been called art among the artes.No is a new type of art, but in the Spanish State, for example, it was approved only two decades ago as an independent discipline. But sound art uses videos, performances, theatre, voice… And there is also sound art without sound. In addition, sound is used in different disciplines that we don't consider sound arts. You can categorize a piece here or there, but in fact I don't see much sense to it."

"There
are more
and more sound artists in the Basque Country. Most men, that's right. And in addition to artists, there are initiatives. The Club L´Larraskito disappeared, but Zaratamo Fest is held every year in a different place, in the Alhóndiga the Hotsetan program was created, in which Oier Iruretagoiena, Miguel Ángel García and Enrike Hurtado work to investigate and bring artists around experimental music and sound art. And also in Fine Arts students, I see more and more interest in acting around sound."