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Other's Dreams
Original title: Sueños de otros
1997
-1998
Wood construction, furniture, photographic reproductions, video projector, monitor and 2 videos transferred to DVD (colour, sound)
Dimensions: 2' 44"
4' 06"
250 x 484 x 180 cm
Reference: ACF0725
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Badiola's most recent works return once again to two notable aspects: his social and political awareness, in relation to an ethical commitment which he has sustained since his first public appearances, and his afflicted, disenchanted genius. Moreover, the titles impose an obscure poetics which transcends their meanings: so, La guerra ha terminado, Vida cotidiana (con dos personajes pretendiendo ser humanos), El juego del otro, Ciudad de nadie, El amor es más frío que la muerte (the title of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first film), Será mejor que cambies (para mejor) or Recuerda: la gente podría decir si estás sonriendo al otro lado de la línea.
Nevertheless, Badiola's internationalism has never made him forget one of his recurrent concerns: the recent history and circumstances of the Basque Country. In his works from the early nineties, when he added to the wood the first images taken from the media or personal memory, he constructed an imaginary country called "Bañilandia", in which he summed up the summa of feelings of affection and social criticism his eye lit upon.
On the subject of Sueños de otros, he himself wrote: "It is an installation I began in San Sebastián. The video was recorded on a course in Arteleku in association with some of the other people taking part. In New York the formal and spatial aspects were decided, the reference taken was a specific zone of my house in the city, to take shape later in Bilbao. Ideas about paranoia, masculinity, violence and its rituals were taken as the starting point of the piece."
For all the multiplicity of signs that make up this work -from the cyclists' fight by the roadside to the reading of a book entitled La estructura del arte, by way of the text recited that talks of love and indifference- makes contact with a common reality or refers to aesthetic thought, its concatenation and the formal play established by its presence shift it with radical iconoclasm towards the present situation of the Basque Country and the effect of that reality on the sculptor when he settled back in Bilbao.
"A city not very modern at heart," he writes, "forced to be the most postmodern, and all that made possible by the play of signs, of gestures, where appearing (selling an image) is not only more important than being, but the only way of being. In such an environment one should not regret any shortage of images or signs; it is the very avalanche of both that has to be dealt with."
