Bidean 2018

Bidean is a Basque word that refers to something or someone that is in the process of or on the path to; it symbolises the transition from adolescence to adulthood, searching for parallels between the ephemeral stages of life and the unstable cycles of nature.

These three self-published works are a fundamental tool used to structure this ongoing project and they fulfill a dual purpose: they are both books and exhibition resources. If you unbind them and follow the coordinates shown on each page, a representative mosaic of each stage appears, including a text by Iván del Rey de la Torre:

Through a complex system of wave emission and reception, adult cachalots produce clicking sounds that echo in their surroundings and then bounce back to them, allowing their brain to generate a type of ultrasound that, in the absence of a sharp conventional vision, helps them perceive what the space they occupy is actually like.

If those waves travel far enough and take sufficient time to return, a series of implausible images seemingly belonging to the past start to appear. However, these should not be interpreted as a déjà vu. Instead, it is important to understand that cachalots undergo a process similar to that of astronomers who contemplate the sky: due to the distance between them and stars they are studying, the light waves they analyse do not reflect the current reality, but a past one. Regardless of the sadness of the event, cachalots still choose to enjoy these images because, as painful as it may be, the slight feeling of having recovered a lost youth is also satisfying. Our own images, for that matter, are a soul-stirring journey to a past that becomes the present.

Images generated by cachalots from extremely straggling waves have revealed beaches, cliffs, streams, forests, mountains… visions they could not possibly have witnessed with their own eyes, which probably belonged to their ancestors, their mammal predecessors who chose to return to the sea or their great-great-grandparents, who might have even laid eggs at some point. Cachalots, therefore, transcend all the bodies that have culminated in their own. Is it possible that one day they might even return to the sea, to the times of the earliest life form? Could there be any use to this ability?

We have always been surrounded by images that are nothing but the melancholic act of stopping to look back at our footsteps, at the trace we leave behind.