ENDIKA BASAGUREN

"Erasing Traces of the Past"

 

Erasing Traces of the Past consists of a series of video and photographic pieces based on various actions and performances, as well as medium and large format graphic work created from scraps of footage leftover from these projects.

These actions are based on the destruction of their own previous variations through fire, thus bringing about the destruction of artistic memory.

What remains after the destruction serves as the foundation for a new work, also based on personal memories and feelings, seeking reconciliation with my own history and memory.

My purpose is to act as a destroyer and eraser of my own work and past in order to realize a new work that will define what ‘I’ am.

One must destroy that which was in order to create anew. Advanced art is the destruction of the former. Rauschenberg is the great example of one creating by destroying, breaking with the art of the past to reflect on the history of art. In my own case, this break is with my own work and my own history.

This project is the disposal of a considerable amount of my work, created over the span of around six years, that I had always kept hidden, perhaps to deny what I myself was at that time.

It is a stage of work in which I do not identify myself because of my own lack of conscience and lucidity in the time of its creation.

The burning of this work has been documented through videos and photographs. The ashes and remains (along with the binders, mediums and wine ‘as a memory and union with that past’ … etc.) are the only means I have to develop my work, a series of anthropometries, self-portraits, stains, etc. all based on personal memories.