FRONT LINE COMPILATION
An artistic encounter between Northern Ireland and the Basque Country

March-July 2002

Front Line Compilation is a programme of events that pays special attention to the local context as a place from which works of art are created. In this way in the Northern Ireland-Basque Country relationship, paradigms and political resolutions are compared with such simple cultural experiences as having a pint, drawing graffiti or taking a photograph.

Front Line Compilation takes art as a starting point from where a certain degree of discontinuity can be established in the cumbersome structure of political affairs, and tries to provide an opportunity to analyse concepts such as national identity, youth sub-cultures, territoriality and collective memory, from a perspective that still needs to be explored.

This season of events proposes to present the Irish example as a case study, that is, not just as a referent but also as a distorting mirror in this identification process. In this way, "local affairs" will be examined through a free-flowing dialogue between cultural archive material and contemporary art, to try and find new ways of interpreting social and political affairs.

Organizations such as Belfast Exposed (a photography society from Belfast) and the Linen Hall Library with its collection of posters and political paraphernalia are presented as a new format for interventions in public space in San Sebastián. These archives, together with alternative and documentary film and video material, make up the "background noise" in which the work of contemporary artists from both contexts is set. The artists that are taking part with individual projects commissioned for the Front Line Compilation Season are: Ibon Aranberri, Phil Collins, Ainara García, Eoghan McTigue, Asier Pérez González and Susan Philipsz.
Other artists taking part in Front Linen Compilation are: Inazio Escudero, Iñaki Garmendia, Seamus Harahan, Asier Mendizabal, Stephen Hackett, John Matthews, Ursula Burke, Daniel Jewesbury, Jon Mikel Euba, Miriam de Burca, the critic Miren Jaio and the independent curator Annie Fletcher.

Through talks, exhibitions, presentations and a variety of textual activities, Front Line Compilation represents an attempt to shift certain clichés and social ideas that make up our everyday cultural landscape onto the terrain of art. In this way it provides an undertone of a situation that questions our pre-conceived ideas about what a local or national community is and the ways in which we provide ourselves with a self-identity.

FLC has been co-produced with Arteleku, with the close collaboration of Donostia Kultura and with the support of the British Council.