“For many years, violence was presented to you just by opening the door of your building,” says photographer Clemente Bernad (Pamplona-Iruñea, 1963). He discovered her one morning in 1987 in his hometown after returning from studying Fine Arts in Barcelona; I was 24 years old. He says that when he left the building he saw a sticker on the door demanding that an ETA prisoner be brought to Basque prisons.
“The nuance was that the sticker was completely scratched with a key, which dramatizes in a very powerful way the conflict in Euskal Herria: someone put the sticker and another person, who did not agree with the demand, tore it,” he explains. Bernad to illustrate the enormous polarization of that period.
It was then when he decided to portray with his camera what he calls “the conflict” – “I know that in most media they usually put quotes around it, but for me it is a conflict,” he says – trying to show the suffering on both sides. “I went from worrying about violence to taking care of it,” he adds. This is what he said during the presentation of Hemendik Hurbil / Prop here (Near here), his new exhibition that stops at the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona and includes 470 images taken over 31 years, from that distant morning in 1987 until the end of the violent cycle, when on May 4, 2018 reads Arnaga’s statement putting an end to ETA in the Basque-French town of Kanbo.
The images from the exhibition are compiled, in turn, in a thick book that also contains texts by significant personalities, artists and intellectuals, such as Bernado Atxaga or the president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory Emilio Silva. In this regard, Bernad has claimed that his work “is an act of historical memory.”
“It has been very long and at times the feeling of boredom and hopelessness has overcome me,” says the artist, who explains that between 2007 and 2015 he decided to step away from this monumental project. The reason was an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its creation; It was curated by Rosa Martínez and she thought it was interesting that the photographer had a space with fourteen photographs.
“We asked permission to use them from the people who appeared and they gave it to us, except in the case of one image, which is the X-ray of Miguel Ángel Blanco’s skull,” he says. The press found out about the refusal and created a dynamic against Bernad that almost ended in prosecution. “They tried to accuse me of glorifying terrorism,” he denounces. “That hurt me a lot,” he says and proclaims that during the 31 years portrayed in the exhibition “I have felt completely alone.”
The Egin case as a shock
In 2015, an event occurred that revived Bernad’s curiosity about the project: the closure of the newspaper Egin, which the Civil Guard had carried out in 2001, was lifted and the artist was able to enter the offices and presses. “Everything was the same as the day it closed, only very deteriorated, unusable,” he says.
In the editorial offices he found photographic archives – “it was all scattered on the floor in folders” – both paper images and negatives. “I photographed everything like a coroner recording the facts,” he points out and adds: “that was tremendous, a great injustice had been committed with Egin and in the end the Supreme Court annulled the closure.”
“Sometimes people tell me that some of my photographs cause them a lot of pain and I think that is normal, because my images are portraits of the pain of a society that, as Bernado Atxaga says in one of the texts that accompany the book, fell into abysmality”, the artist says gravely, who then clarifies that “abysmality” is a word invented by the writer to define the feeling that Basque society had for too long that it was going towards the abyss.
A delicate job, but necessary
With the images taken in Egin, Bernad decides to close the project and prepare the book, which finally gave rise to the exhibition, thanks to the work of its curator, the critic and curator Carles Guerra. He highlighted in the presentation that Bernad’s “is a work [políticamente] very delicate, but also necessary to bear witness to what an era was.”
“They are images designed to penetrate little by little to whoever looks at them,” Guerra insists on portraits that, in effect, are devoid of drama and effects on the surface, but that, observed calmly, give off tension, anger, resignation and, above all, a heavy background load of violence. Bernad, in the style of Cartier-Bresson, focuses on secondary events to account for the dimension of the events.
Guerra has also referred to the arrangement of the photographs: “On many occasions the work of the curator is that of a decorator who decides how the spaces are distributed in an exhibition, but in cases like this this work transcends and requires a different effort.” ”. In this regard, he explained that the images have not been arranged following any type of temporal sequence “but rather they are distributed randomly on the wall to reflect the feeling of chaos that the conflict actually was.”
Museums in ideological crisis
Thus, burials of ETA members are mixed with those of civil guards and ertzainas, and in between riots, fire, hooded people, desolate relatives and even some countryside landscapes, as if they were necessary oases of peace amid so much pain hanging on the wall. In fact Hemendik Hurbil / Prop here It has four rooms, two of them with several series of portraits displayed on paper treated with silver and selenium emulsions. The other two contain large screens where the rest of the 470 images that make up the exhibition are displayed in a loop.
Finally, the director of La Virreina Center de la Image Valentin Roma has assured that after having had Jeff Wall at the center in the previous exhibition, “Bernad’s is as important or more so if possible.” The reason, according to Rome, is that with Hemendik Hurbil / Prop here A new period opens in the museum of ideological crisis.
“The majority of museums are developing an ideological language, but at the same time they are trying to avoid creating any type of political tension, thus avoiding entering into specific historical conflicts,” he said, stating: “We could call that an ideological crisis.” Consequently, for Rome this exhibition is “the Vicereina’s opening to a space for reflection on this ideological crisis”, where she has predicted that more exhibitions of a political and, surely, controversial nature will be held.
Beyond Rome’s reflections on the role of museums in the political debate, Hemendik Hurbil / Prop here For the viewer, it will be an overwhelming succession of images full of tension, pain and violence. They are snapshots of a time that for some people of a certain age will be more familiar and for others, younger, foreign or new. But we will probably all be overwhelmed by the emotional charge with which Clemente Bernad has been able to imbue them.
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