Questions

1. What made you choose art as a profession?
Art chose us. We were really bored studying architecture and wanted to do different things not strictly on the curriculum by organising different activities. One of these was Basurama, which at the time was a competition for creative reuse. Without realising it, we were producing situations that modified the reality around us, which at the end of the day is what we think art is all about (or at least the art we’re interested in).

 

2. How would you define your work?
Basurama is a work platform designed to create possibilities, action, production processes and documentation and provoke thought linked to waste in all its forms, always seeking to actively involve the maximum number of agents. Basurama isn’t art with rubbish. Basurama isn’t an architecture collective. Is Basurama a circus?

 

3. What subjects are you interested in?
Economics, politics, the environment, advertising, culture and cultural policies, private life, games, humour, public space, architecture and urban planning, Dada, Situationism, the internet, truth and lies, poetry, music, love, even rubbish… In general, we’re interested in everything.

 

4. What resources – formal or otherwise – do you use in your work?
Waste is the raw material for our work. We’ve worked with all kinds of waste: rubbish we’ve found in the street to territory-wide refuse and industrial waste.
When we put waste at the centre of our discourse, we’re interested in it as a tool, a material for creation and a mechanism for thinking about what we are (as people, as a community, as a society…). It’s a way of questioning the very structures we form part of to look for alternatives. The tension created by this twofold nature of rubbish as a medium and cause for reflection is one of the engines that drive our work.

 

5. What relationship does your work have with reality? What are your raw materials?
“Reality is perfect”* for us, so that’s why we play with it. Working with what there is out there means the context plays a larger role and there’s a greater creative strength than when you create parallel realities. Our raw materials are the cracks created by the contemporary production system and economy. We think our activity can help reveal or explain processes taking place in our reality.
*Joseph Hunter.

 

6. What, according to you, is the point of art?
If it has a point, it’s to offer a public service. In certain situations it can help create possibilities for changing things or at least help understand reality. We see art as a tool for social change and therefore an instrument for work and action. It’s got nothing to do with contemplative, aesthetic processes or unfathomable searches for truth understood as beauty. Faced with art as a mystical space, we’d choose life – the evocative space where we develop as people.

 

7. How do you hope the public will receive your work? What audience are you aiming at?
We aim at all audiences and hope people have a good time and think as they laugh.

 

8. What qualifications have you got? What do you value most from your time in education?
We started by fleeing from architecture and then from institutions. Or at least from the inbreeding we suffered at architecture school. Escaping was a show of independence. At university, faced with a tedious unidirectional approach, we unconsciously started to get a work momentum going, like other groups of people at the time. We began to come up with ideas, explore, make mistakes. We learnt to manage ourselves and set up an independent work platform to carry out the action and ideas we’re interested in. This active escape freed us from architecture and its most conventional work.

 

You could say architecture was the starting point because it was what we fled from. Once we had overcome our complexes, we were in it as a field of work. We also value the breadth offered by our architecture education, which opens lots of doors: from philosophy to furniture design, from graphic design to video editing, from typography to calculating structures, from insulation to urban planning, from marketing to film, from trash culture to linear algebra.

 

9. How would you define your current professional situation? And in the future?
We think we’re at a very exciting moment because everything is growing – we’re interested in growing in terms of content and format, rather than size – along many different paths and something new is always coming up. We’ve always felt like this, seduced by the wide range of possibilities that were – and are – opening up. Professional uncertainty and vagueness creates a state of constant alert where limiting or defining yourself is suicide. Don’t confuse uncertainty with precariousness: fight against precariousness in the midst of uncertainty.

 

10. Many artists say it’s difficult to make a living from their work; how do economic considerations affect you when it comes to work? Do you think this has a bearing on your work?
In our experience life and work constantly mix together and it’s often difficult to give this fusion some shape. In principle, each Basurama project is different and there aren’t any laws on profitability. There’s an economic structure linked to a collective project structure (where contents and work are carried out) and they complement each other to forge a common stability so Basurama can carry on existing based on individual stabilities.

 

We’ve got a lot of work and not much money. We hope to balance this out, although we’re quite sure we don’t want to be rich and we don’t want to have not much work.

 

11. What do you look for or expect from your relationship with promoters and curators? What advantages and difficulties have you found with these relationships?
We hope to work as equals. We’ve worked at almost all levels of contemporary creation (production, management, creation, promotion, curating, mediation, etc.). In reality, we like working in all of them.

 

12. What do you think sets the arts scene in Madrid apart from elsewhere? What would you say are its pluses and minuses?
Given our education and heterogeneous work, when we think about the ‘Madrid scene’ what comes to mind are the art, political, theatre, architecture, social, musical, poetry scenes… From this point of view, the arts scene in Madrid is too broad and heterogeneous to describe it as a whole. This archive, for example, tries to create a nonexistent artificial order and although it’s a positive initiative, it runs the risk of simplifying this scene.

Interview

Curriculum vitae

Basurama
Madrid, creado en 2001 e inscrito en el registro de asociaciones el 06 abril de 2005.
Tiene su base en Madrid y trabaja por donde puede/They’re based in Madrid and work where they can.

Basurama está formado por/Is formed by Yago Bouzada Biurrun, Benjamín Castro Terán, Alberto Nanclares da Veiga, Juan López-Aranguren Blázquez, Rubén Lorenzo Montero, Manuel Polanco Pérez-Llantada, Pablo Rey Mazón y Miguel Rodríguez Cruz
 

Formación Académica/Education
Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, ETSAM, Madrid.

Exposiciones Individuales/Solo Exhibitions
2010-2008
Residuos Urbanos Sólidos: Import/Export de toda clase de basura, Centro Cultural de España en México D.F.; Centro Cultural de España en Montevideo; Centro Cultural de España en Santo Domingo, República Dominicana; Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires; Centro Cultural de España en Lima.

 

2006
Basurama Panorámica, La Casa Encendida, Madrid.  

Exposiciones Colectivas/Group Exhibitions
2010
Territorio Lleida, Centre d'Art La Panera, Lleida.

 

2010-2009
Revolviendo la basura: Residuos y reciclajes en el arte actual, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastián; Centro de Arte y Naturaleza, CDAN, Fundación Beulas, Huesca; Patio Herreriano, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Español, Valladolid.

 

2009
What You Can Do With the City, Canadian Centre for Architecture, CCA, Montreal.

 

2009-2008
Linz, Texas. A city relates, Stadtmuseum Graz, Linz; Architekturzentrum, Wien; Aedes Pfefferberg, Berlin.

 

2008
Basurama Panorámica ampliada, VI Biennal d’Art Leandre Cristòfol, Centre d'Art La Panera, Lleida.
Urban TV 2008, VI Festival Internacional de Televisión sobre Vida y Ecología Urbanas, La Casa Encendida, Madrid.

Proyectos/Projects
2010-2008
Residuos Urbanos Sólidos (RUS), serie de proyectos encadenados realizados en varias ciudades de Iberomamérica. Con la colaboración de un agente cultural de España en cada región. Miami; México D.F.; Santo Domingo, República Dominicana; Buenos Aires; Montevideo; Córdoba, Argentina; Asunción, Paraguay; San Juan de Puerto Rico; Lima.

 

2009
Todo sobre ruedas, intervención participativa, eme3, International Architecture Festival, Plaça dels Àngels, Barcelona.
Taller Novas Formas de habitar a Cidade, Instituto Cervantes, Brasilia. Organizado por el Instituto Cervantes y Basurama.

 

2009-2008
Taller Diseño de Sobra, Vías de intervención y dinamización de espacio públicos, Palacio de la prensa, Madrid; Matadero Madrid, Madrid; My perfect neighbours, Korea Design Foundation. Seoul.
Festival Extraterrestres'09:Baleàrics, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid.
Festival Extraterrestres'08:Catalanes, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid.

 

2008
Casi todo lo que compras lo tiras, serie de actividades y acciones: instalación de cubo 3x3 m. de basura; taller de tejido con la colaboración de Entupunto; publicidad en diversas estaciones de tren y metro de Madrid, Barcelona y Sevilla; Meta-merchandising, Madrid.
Serie 100% sostenible, Capítulo #64: Murcia. Lechugas, pelotas de golf y otros animales, Patio Maravillas, Madrid.

 

2007
Eres lo que tiras, representación de los hábitos de consumo del municipio de Benicassim durante el festival de música independiente. Festival Internacional de Benicàssim, FIB Heineken 2007, Benicassim, Castelló.
Se Regala Plaza, La Noche en Blanco, Centro Cultural Conde Duque (Madrid), Madrid.

 

2006
Yo amo la M30, viaje turístico a las obras de la M30 del pasado, Madrid.

Becas y Premios/Awards and Grants
2008
Urban TV 2008, VI Festival Internacional de Televisión sobre Vida y Ecología Urbanas, Obra Social Caja Madrid, Madrid. (Finalista/Finalist)

 

2007
Premio compromiso urbano colectivo, Club de Debates Urbanos, Madrid.
 

Obra en Museos y Colecciones/Works in Museums and Collections
Collegi D'Arquitectes de Catalunya, Lleida.

Bibliografía/Bibliography
Ganau, Joan; Jové, Antoni; Picazo, Gloria, "Territori Lleida", Lleida, Ajuntament de Lleida, Centre d'Art La Panera, 2010, Cat. Exp.
Rey Mazón, Pablo, Basurama, "La reutilización es el autostop de la arquitectura", Caja de Herramientas, Sevilla, I/2010.

Nogué, Joan, "Revolviendo en la basura. Residuos y reciclajes en el arte actual", San Sebastián, Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea; Centro de Arte y Naturaleza, CDAN, Fundación Beulas, Huesca, 2009, Cat. Exp.
Méndez, Ana, "Urbanacción 07/09", Madrid, La Casa Encendida, 2009, Cat. Exp.
Fourmont-Dainville, Guillaume, "Madrid Régénérations. Parte: Un visage humain, Madrid, Autrement: Collection en mouvement", 2009, Cat. Exp.
Arenós, Xavier; Martí Peran, Doménec, "Spam magazine vol.6", Roulotte, Santiago de Chile, ACM Associació per a la cultura i l'Art Contemporani, 2009, Cat. Exp.
Castro, Benjamín; Lorenzo, Rubén, "Festival de la basura, Summa+", n 102, Buenos Aires, 7/IV/2009, pp. 116-119.
Castro, Benjamín; Basurama, "Basurama", Paisea, n 12 LOW COST, Cult Landscape, 2009.

De Vicente, José Luis, "La otra vida de la basura, basurama analiza el papel de los residuos", El cultural, El Mundo, 19-25/VI/2009, pp.30.
Bosco, R.
Caldana, S., "Los artistas se apuntan a combatir la contaminación!", El País digital, 06/XI/2008.
Maderuelo, J., "Consume basura", Babelia, El País, 23/IX/2006.

Contacto/Contact
Avenida de Daroca, 49, callejón. 28017 Madrid
(+34) 911152382, (+34) 600536517
info@basurama.org
www.basurama.org

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