“For many years, violence was presented to you simply by opening the door of your building,” explains photographer Clemente Bernad (Pamplona-Iruñea, 1963). He discovered it one morning in 1987 in his hometown, after his return from Fine Arts in Barcelona; I was 24 years old. He says that when he left the building, he saw a sticker on the door demanding that an ETA prisoner be taken to Basque prisons.
“The nuance was that the sticker was completely scratched with a key, which dramatizes in a very powerful way the conflict in Euskal Herria: someone put the sticker and another person, who did not agree with the demand, tore it up,” he explains. Bernad to illustrate the enormous polarization of this period.
It was at that moment that he decided to depict with his camera what he calls “the conflict” – “I know in most media they usually put quotes around it, but for for me, it’s a conflict,” he says – trying to show the suffering. on both sides. “I went from worrying about the violence to caring for it,” he adds. This is what he declared during the presentation of Hemendik Hurbil / Prop here (Near Here), his new exhibition which stops at the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona and includes 470 images taken over 31 years, from that distant morning in 1987 until the end of the violent cycle, when on May 4, 2018 reads Arnaga’s statement ending ETA in the Basque-French town of Kanbo.
The images from the exhibition are collected in turn in a thick book which also contains texts from important personalities, artists and intellectuals, such as Bernado Atxaga or the president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, Emilio Silva. In this regard, Bernad affirmed that his work “is an act of historical memory”.
“It lasted a very long time and sometimes a feeling of boredom and despair invaded me,” says the artist, who explains that between 2007 and 2015 he decided to move away from this monumental project. The reason was an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its creation; The exhibition was organized by Rosa Martínez and she found it interesting that the photographer had a space with fourteen photographs.
“We asked those present for permission to use them and they gave it to us, except in the case of one image, which is the X-ray of the skull of Miguel Ángel Blanco,” he said. The press learned of the refusal and created a dynamic against Bernad which almost led to prosecution. “They tried to accuse me of glorifying terrorism,” he denounces. “It hurt me a lot,” he says and proclaims that for the 31 years depicted in the exhibition, “I felt completely alone.”
The Egin case as a shock
In 2015, an event reignited Bernad’s curiosity about the project: the closure of the Egin newspaper, carried out by the Civil Guard in 2001, was lifted and the artist was able to enter the offices and presses. “Everything was like the day it closed, but very deteriorated, unusable,” he says.
In the editorial offices, he found photographic archives – “everything was scattered on the floor in files” – both paper images and negatives. “I photographed everything like a coroner recording the facts,” he emphasizes and adds: “it was huge, a great injustice had been committed with Egin and finally the Supreme Court overturned the closure.”
“Sometimes people tell me that some of my photographs cause them a lot of pain and I think that’s normal, because my images are portraits of the pain of a society which, as Bernado Atxaga says in one texts which accompany the book, which has fallen into the abyss”, says the artist gravely, who then specifies that “abyss” is a word invented by the writer to define the feeling that Basque society has had for too long of go towards the abyss.
A delicate job, but necessary
With the images taken in Egin, Bernad decided to close the project and prepare the book, which ultimately gave birth to the exhibition, thanks to the work of its curator, the critic and curator Carles Guerra. He emphasized in the presentation that Bernad “is a work [políticamente] very delicate, but also necessary to bear witness to what an era was like.
“These are images designed to penetrate little by little those who look at them,” insists Guerra on portraits which, in fact, are devoid of drama and surface effects, but which, observed calmly, release tension, anger, resignation and, and above all, a heavy load of violence in the background. Bernad, like Cartier-Bresson, focuses on secondary events to reflect the dimension of the events.
Guerra also spoke about the arrangement of the photographs: “Often the work of the curator is that of a decorator who decides the distribution of spaces in an exhibition, but in cases like this, this work transcends and requires a different effort . “”. In this regard, he explained that the images were not arranged in any type of temporal sequence “but rather were randomly distributed across the wall to reflect the sense of chaos that the conflict actually was.” .
Museums in ideological crisis
Thus, the burials of ETA members mingle with those of the civil guards and ertzainas, and between riots, fires, hooded people, desolate relatives and even certain countryside landscapes, as if they were oases peace needed in the midst of so much pain hanging on the wall. . Actually Hemendik Hurbil / Prop here It includes four rooms, two of which present several series of portraits exhibited on paper treated with silver and selenium emulsions. The other two contain large screens where the rest of the 470 images that make up the exhibition are displayed in a loop.
Finally, the director of La Virreina Image Center Valentin Roma assured that after having had Jeff Wall at the center during the previous exhibition, “that of Bernad is as important or more if possible”. The reason, according to Rome, is that with Hemendik Hurbil / Prop here A new period is opening in the museum of ideological crisis.
“The majority of museums develop an ideological language, but at the same time they try to avoid creating any type of political tension, thus avoiding entering into specific historical conflicts,” he said, adding: “We We could call this an ideological crisis. .” Therefore, for Rome, this exhibition is “the opening of the Vicereina to a space for reflection on this ideological crisis”, where it predicts that more exhibitions of a political and, surely, controversial nature will take place.
Beyond Roman reflections on the role of museums in the political debate, Hemendik Hurbil / Prop here For the viewer, it will be a shocking succession of images full of tension, pain and violence. They are snapshots of a time that, for some people of a certain age, will be more familiar and for others, younger, foreign or new. But we will probably all be overwhelmed by the emotional charge with which Clemente Bernad knew how to imbue them.
