The practice of Josu Bilbao (Bermeo, 1978) is based on observing certain visible and invisible conditions, perceptible according to when and how, of his surrounding environment and the spaces he temporarily occupies as an artist. This endeavour depends on both physical action and inaction between which his way of working often fluctuates. The answer, always partial, never expressed as definitive, can be to remove rather than to add, to dismantle rather than to build. When tackling a space, its architecture, within its institutionalism, the process of imagining the making and unmaking of the structures that define it leads to a series of attempts that take shape.

The experience of language, a minoritised, phonetic, embodied experience, represents another constant reflection in his work on the fragility and loss of marginalised languages and dialects/ecolects based on oral tradition. Likewise, how these are inscribed in the body, in the organs that transform them into sound, in the specificities that are not registered in normative texts but are indeed done so in gestures and affects. A minor language in the sense that a minority practises it and, in the context in which Josu Bilbao deploys it, it acquires a political dimension.

The title of the exhibition, h, stems partly from a reflection on the historical processes of unifying the Basque language and the words that have emerged to define the parts of the body involved in the production of a sound. This is the case of the inhaled /h/, a specific type of movement and relationship between the oral cavity and the diaphragm. This /h/ refers also to what potentially happens in the room, with the perceptible and imperceptible rhythms that inhabit it. Within these forms of tackling space through the respiratory system that becomes tongue, the soundtrack composed specifically for h by Estanis Comella (Lleida, 1985), proposes an abstract rhythm with which we can potentially mark the beat for ourselves.

BROCHURE