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Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2004 by Maeve Connolly

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Casa Ciriza exhibition also features a number of collaborative, research-based projects that are more specifically concerned with the development of Basque art and society. Operacion H (Nestor Basterretxea, 1963) originated as a sponsored film about Spanish industry. Documentary modes of representation were rejected, however, in favor of a collage of abstract and sculptural forms, and fleeting shots of factory-workers and architectural models. The film is represented in Manifesta 5 by a contemporary Basque collective, Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak, as the focal point of their ongoing research into the history of collaborative practice. The other collaborative work is an interactive database produced by The Office of Alternative Urban Planning (TOOAUP). This ongoing project developed out of a partnership between Manifesta and the Amsterdam-based Berlage Institute, a postgraduate laboratory research in architecture, urban planning and landscape design. The region's complex structures of decision-making and financing would seem to have limited the scope of the project and this might explain the form taken by the database. Instead of standard menus or search tools, a series of opaque "dataclouds" are presented, perhaps replicating the complexity of the planning process. Ultimately it is difficult to discern many details of the planning proposals, except that they seem to involve the development of a beach at Pasaia. It is too soon to judge the final outcome of this collaboration but a different mode of presentation would perhaps have served the exhibition audience better.

In terms of its direct engagement with urban development the work in Pasaia seems to signal a curatorial shift away from performative nomadism and towards a more explicitly site-based engagement with local constituencies. This is particularly apparent in several projects in exterior sites. Huseyin Alptekin has produced a number of works that seem deliberately intended to elude any visitor unfamiliar with the town. The only one that might be easily spotted by the outsider is a sign for the "Hotel Panama", located outside the main exhibition that is evidently out of place in a site bypassed by tourism. Jan de Cock's architectural installation at a former shipbuilding warehouse in Ondartxo, also proves difficult to locate without assistance from bemused local residents. Ondartxo is a space in transition, the site of a proposed museum/conservation project that is now mired in bureaucracy, and de Cock has responded by creating a structure that fuses formal excess with an absence of function. During the course of the exhibition, however, parts of the structure have acquired a function, as shelter for the security staff, giving rise to the kind domestic clutter that (again) recalls installations by Mike Nelson. For certain visitors these projects might be just as opaque as TOOUP's "dataclouds" but, by making the familiar strange, they seem to invite a more organic exploration of Pasaia's possible futures.