La Isla de los Vascos (The Island of the Basque People) is a project designed by Joan Foncuberta for ARTIUM Álava. It refers to a small island located in the estuary of the river San Lorenzo, approximately 124 miles north of Quebec (Canada). As from the Sixteenth Century, the Island became the destination and operations base for the Basque whaling community engaged in the capture and commercialisation of this mammal.

The Island of the Basque People is presented, under the appearance of a historic or ethnographic exhibition whose aim is, on the one hand, to offer a critical review of documentary aesthetics and function, and on the other, to debate the conditions under which its credibility is sustained. At the same time, the projects aims at reporting and recalling certain less known passages of Basque history.

The visitor is transported to remote places and times by means of a classical museum display, which recreates an expedition using archaeological objects, maps, engravings, scale models and even the skeleton of a whale. Besides offering information on the issue, the scenographic composition magnifies and even venerates the exhibited objects, thus, inducing the visitor to perceive them as authentic symbols of the past history of Basque people. To introduce and offer clues to understand the meaning of this project, a selection of photographs by the artist are displayed. The exhibited photographic work has a pseudo-documental character with a highly ironical dose. They cover different scientific disciplines such as zoology and anthropology. The ambiguity and parody-like overtones in such work aim at awakening in the visitor's mind the question about the authenticity of The Island of the Basque People.

The versatile Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) besides being and artist, he is also an exhibition commissioner, a writer and a teacher. His oeuvre is characterised both by its critical and ironical spirit, and by its radicalism when searching in the nature of the photographic document and the limits of its language. Invested, as he himself explains, with a halo of a fake artist, his goal is not reproducing a number of formal features with his camera; he aims at questioning what photograph is and what it might attain to be.

Although photography is the most traditional way of expressing reality, Fontcuberta questions such idea and expresses through his work the decisive influence of the socio-cultural context when interpreting images. In past series such as Herbarium, Fauna and Moby Dick, the artist makes a parody and questions the precision and authenticity of indisputable disciplines such as botanic and zoology. He does this by means of highly realistic pictures which he himself manipulates. Fontcuberta's artistic trajectory connects with surrealism, out of which he takes the critical and ironical side, and with conceptual art, connecting with its cold, analytical, rational aspect.

Disciplines such as Zoology, botanic, astronomy and history are disguised and even distorted by the artist's camera to make them look less credible and less valuable. In the hands of this magician of images, nothing is what is seams. So, what about The Island of the Basque People?