About Front Line Compilation

A brief description of Front Line Compilation could be that it is "an art project that brings together the Basque Country and Northern Ireland". This encounter is not an exchange, in the sense that nothing is given back afterwards. It's more an appropriation that uses and exploits the referent of a context that works as a distorting mirror when viewed from our disorientated situation here in the Basque Country.

Structurally FLC has been conceived as a season of artistic events that take place from March to July this year in various places in San Sebastián.
Its flexible structure based on a mixture of planning and improvisation that form the essence of D.A.E. means that decision-making has a process-based character.

At first sight, you could take the case of Ireland as other people take Islam or the situation in the Middle East as a subject to reflect on differences with the aim of unravelling a certain accumulated discourse. However, if we go the heart of the matter, it is rooted in a purely local question: the admiration that sectors of Basque nationalism have professed for the socio-political situation in Northern Ireland as a model for a political resolution of the so-called "Basque conflict". This admiration has increased especially since the start of the Northern Irish peace process established by the Good Friday Agreement.
The identification of Basque nationalism with the political and social conflict in Northern Ireland has its historical epigone in an identification with Irish culture and roots. What is interesting about this matter is that this identification in front of the mirror does not reflect the image back from the other side. It is unidirectional from here to there, and furthermore exists on an imaginary plane.

In view of the warmth and sympathy that all aspects of "Irishness" arouse in certain social strata, we thought it would be interesting to use this as a kind of Case Study applied to the art that is being produced in both contexts. So, what underlies FLC is this attempt to transfer certain clichés associated with the social and political sphere to the field of "the real world" formed by the very latest artistic work. Contradictions and deadlock forestall this identification process along the way.
First of all we can see two opposing artistic traditions. On the one hand, a deep-rooted tradition as far as dealing with explicitly political themes is concerned, with a special emphasis on the effects of the sectarian military violence unleashed since the start of the Troubles in 1969. And, the desire of the modern Irish artistic community to work in a direction that breaks with the cliché that Northern Irish art is only concerned with reflecting the Troubles.

On the other hand we have the opposite example in the current situation of the Basque Country, where there is an awareness of the added value provided by the use of certain local factors as a mark of the construction of identity. Without wishing to generalise, this symptom lies somewhere between an amnesia about the recent past with regard to the effects of terrorism and trauma and a condition that we could refer to as exotic as far as the use of local iconographic elements or the variety of aesthetic approaches to social affairs is concerned.
These two contrasting speeds have their equivalent in the current socio-political situations in each of the two societies. This is where the conceptual matrix formed by FLC gives way to an explosion of signs.
One of the foundations of the project lies in the friction caused by bringing together and introducing material that is not strictly artistic in a framework of artistic discourse. An example of this are the exhibitions of archive material by organisations and institutions such as Belfast Exposed, a photography organisation that aims to organise exhibitions, create archives and provide support for the photographic community in Belfast, and the Linen Hall Library with its Collection of Political Posters about the Conflict in Northern Ireland. In these cases they have been presented along with lectures, presentations or performances by artists, in order to try and establish links between discourses, mix audiences and give a certain boost to the situation. As far as discourse is concerned, this occurs as a result of the capacity for performance.

Another point of inflection lies in the break with the conventions that assume that projects by artists that are based on these premises must inevitably be politically active or form part of the pseudo-Marxist tradition of "political art". Far removed from this, what we are trying to do is to investigate the limits of folklore with art, nationalist kitsch, and local subcultures or even to create activities that negotiate with town planning and the depiction of society. By negotiating with these themes, we have found proposals that are on the boundaries of what we can call art.
Furthermore, at a deeper level of desire, the questioning of the foundations of nationalist sentiment based on the triad of territory, language and blood underlies our subconscious.

It is interesting to stress the semantic interpretations of the title. The soundtrack to FLC is rock music; it may be a current of punk rock from any region, even a local or rural one. Front Line Compilation is the title of a compilation album by the band led by Fermín Muguruza, Negu Gorriak. A song by this group at the beginning of the 80's said, "It is Rock on the Front Line that you can tell is present here."

While FLC has been running, to our surprise we have heard about the launch of at least two (cultural and leisure) Irish weeks that different organisations with a definite political ideology have been putting on in San Sebastián. When we got in touch and met them, our aims proved to be partly from a field that they knew nothing about: art.
This is when the clichés produced by an encounter that is more or less artistic become real and contradictory.

Finally, FLC is trying to negotiate to use various cultural institutions in the city (often run by political opponents) to expand and redefine the very notion of local public space. D.A.E. is negotiating in the middle of these inter-institutional connections.

San Sebastián, 6th of June 2002

Published in El Temp's d'Art nº 2, Barcelona 2002

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