Not just a song by Boney M - "Belfast Exposed", photographs of a divided city.

What is "Front Line Compilation"? This title, with its aftertaste of 77, is a "programme of events that gives Northern Ireland and the Basque Country the chance to get to know each other ". So, throughout spring and summer a series of events will be held in Donostia, ranging from political poster exhibitions from Northern Ireland and documentary video and film screenings to specific projects. Presented by DAE, this compilation proposes "to explore concepts such as national identity, youth subcultures, territoriality and collective memory". "Belfast Exposed", the photographic exhibition that opens this programme, will be presented at Egia cultural centre until the 16th.

In order to understand "Front Line Compilation" better there is no harm in explaining a couple of things first, however obvious they may seem. First of all, in days gone by, when the modernist project was still valid, people still thought of art as the driving force behind socio-political changes. Nowadays, nobody talks about utopias anymore. Even so, we should have no doubts about the capacity of art to reflect on the reality of the situation that surrounds it; especially now, when nobody is worried about its possible potential to shock. Secondly, people are panicking about one of the most worrying consequences of globalisation: a numbing standardisation (which will end up making an urban Castilian landscape indistinguishable from an urban Siberian landscape,) has led to the recent re-evaluation of what is known as "local" contexts. So, FLC needs to be understood as a project that examines two "local" contexts, in the Basque Country and Northern Ireland, which have a specific complex socio-political reality.

Having said this it might seem that FLC was a kind of friendly match between the Basque and Northern Irish sides, with the additional danger of falling into the fetishist temptation to make parallelisms to the effect that "in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country there are socio-political conflicts, therefore both of them are the same". Nevertheless, despite the friendly nature of the project, its structure is not symmetrical. The team that is playing away here has come with more players. In FLC the Northern Irish side has a stronger presence and is used as a "comparative case", "not just as a referent but also as a distorting mirror in this identification process".

This lack of symmetry is quite clear in "Belfast Exposed", the photographic exhibition that Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak is opening this season with. From among the specifically artistic projects and the ones that consist of cultural archive material that exist side by side in FLC, "Belfast Exposed" would form part of this second group of documentary projects. "Belfast Exposed" is the name of a community photography association that was set up in 1983. This organisation has a photography archive, made up of both amateur and professional photographic images, that documents daily life in Belfast during the last three decades. So, "Belfast Exposed" helps to dissuade us from falling into the temptation to make parallels. Because on the one hand, the documentary tradition that is such a characteristic feature of areas of English-speaking influence is a concept that over here seems quite remote. And on the other, because we are dealing with a community-arts, or "art for all", project, a legacy of the Welfare State model, that is unknown here, and is generally considered to be a failure.

Despite all this, visitors come out of the Cultural centre in Egia impressed by the images that they have seen there. Because the prosaic and detached nature of the archive tradition and the boring and inane aspects of the spirit of the community arts clash with everyday life in Belfast; a reality that is split into two camps, where the Protestant and Catholic districts are separated by the euphemistic peace lines or dividing walls where there is a permanent military presence.

In this way the dialectical conflict in the city turns out to be photogenic and even glamorous. Because, why are we going to deny it, seen from the outside all conflicts are like this: images of paramilitaries teaching young Protestants a lesson in which the latter are turned into human sculptures, tied to posts and covered with white paint; armed gangs posing for the camera, hooded and wearing full-dress uniforms; the pathos of farewells at funerals... a kind of voyeurism that Phil Collins, who took part in "International Language", the urban intervention project that took place in Belfast in 2001 and that appears on video in Egia, reveals in "Holidays in other people's misery", in which photos of destroyed houses printed on t-shirts for sale while "Belfast" by Boney M. plays in the background.

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