With the title About desire Begoña Egurbide introduces a group of five videos with which she tries to embody a distance, an emptiness, a lackage and a possession desire: nothing is static, but that everything moves and slide in an interstitial stage, in the middle of reality and fiction, the non material and the material, and between desire, PULSION and its consummation. Is because of that the different tempos and the splitness of the main characters in her videos, that they move between what they are, what they would have like being and what they have been. As Begoña Egurbide states: “Our bodies change, but the kid we all have inside is there, not renouncing being past, and CONFRATERNIZANDO with a present that constantly project on to the future.
Amidst this temporalities game we do not know which of the MEDIOS, the visual, the written or the oral, imposes over the others, because what we have before our eyes its not only a group of moving images activated via video technology, nor a cinematographic , not even an expanded painting but a weird hybrid genre that equally shares notoriety between the snapshot (image of unique and decisive moments), the pictorial representation, the theatrical stage design, and the literary and cinematographic narrative plot.
Before Begoña Egurbide´s artworks we may talk of videos-poems or videos-essays with the overlapping of images, voices, sounds and narrations. Almost as a continuity of what her 80´s paintings were, in which under thick layers of matter and texture and hidden amongst star images or different geometric bodies, one could read poems, phrases, words, in most cases cryptic and hidden. And everything entrusted to the power of the glance: short glances, long glances, rapprochements, estrangements, in front/behind games: from nearby the world and from far away, the painting. The painting as a “PALIMSESTO”, as a difficult access area, as the brain and the unconscious also are.
Begoña Egurbide feels comfortable prowling through a territory as elusive as the subconscious, a dark area that longs to unveil and a factory where desires are generated. We produce something, seems to suggest Begoña Egurbide in a clear allusion to Gilles Deluze’s theories, when we desire. It’s because of this that desire goes always together with a movement, a spontaneous movement that is born before the desirable object (or desired) and unleashes its own strategies: desire is the act of arranging, of constructing a linked together arrangement of elements that form a group. Desire, just as Egurbide shows in her videos, flows within an arrangement or linking, in which the images constantly negotiate with the texts that may adopt a text format as well as a verbal and sonorous one.
A whispering voice that repeats phrases such as “I caress your thighs” “Caress my breasts”, with clear and not hidden connotations to a sex that passes between the innocence and the childhood idealisim and the maturity frustration, constitutes La habitacion silenciosa(The silent room) video’s DE FONDO murmur in which almost abstract images along with domestic images on a “living still life” manner, all of it under a mastering of the environment structuring geometry.
The whisper, almost the artificial voice midway between man and the machine, or the ficticiously childish voice constitutes the “sound track” of another video, Macrocaricias Tokio (N.2)/Tokio Macro Caresses. “I miss you” “Why don’t you answer me” “Are you awake” and a whole group of short phrases taken out from SMS mobile messages that overshadow strong and suggestive Tokio´s indoor and outdoor views, the nocturnal and silent Tokio, aerial views and framings more suitable to the cinematographic discourse, that in their scale and grandeur border on the aesthetic and sublime field.
La lechuga y el caracol/The lettuce and the snail is another short video in which the already mentioned SALTOS TEMPORALES and the passing from reality to fiction COBRA all its meaning. Everything seems to be born from the universal intuition lost forever in the maternal womb, in which childhood, youth, maturity and the old age seem to be revealed in pieces at any given time.
In Pandora, the artist talks about the non biological way in which we experience our lives, where once again desire seems to feed an impossible future, where what we know is pending of being lived. The work alludes to the memory and tackles through two main characters (a swinging girl and a woman making love) different narrative levels that generates the changes that shape our world.
Maybe out of all Egurbide videos, the one that because of its argumental concentration, its preciousism and its simplicity she manages to go beyond on a bigger way the ordinary in order to raise it to the symbol category is the one titled The Hours. The fictional encounter between two bodies that correspond to different temporalities (the face of an attractive young woman and the upper middle body of a mature and fat elder woman) talks about the youth of our desires, the permanence of our intentions and the feelings before a body that abandons us. A new incursion to a deep reflection over the human condition typical of Egurbide´s work that FORMA PARTE of her wider series named Aprendizaje-Learning with which she has been working since 2002 in which she deals with different narrative levels that generate the changes that shape our world.
Barcelona, 3rd of February 2008