These two large-format pieces by Jon Mikel Euba originally formed part of a larger set called A Minute's Silence. Linked together one beside the other and one on top of the other leaving no space between them, unframed but simply hung from hooks, they formed a mural at the exhibition 'Some Things are Moving' (Soledad Lorenzo Gallery, Madrid, 2005). However, they were first published a year earlier by the Basque Government when Bilbao-born Euba won the Gurea Artea Award. In this work he seeks to avoid classifications and qualifications: 'I am bored with being one of those Basque artists who talks about his context. I am currently trying to get away from this stereotype that makes it so easy for curators to use my work without fully understanding it because of the fashion for what some call political art'.

Most of his images come from the mass media: he has a notebook with photos of rock stars and sportsmen and women in climactic poses that he then alters. He screen-prints them in very large sizes and turns them into choral murals, seeking to spark a build-up of energy and tension between the images and their viewers. For Euba these black and white screen prints, which show blurred human forms sometimes verging on the abstract, are guidelines for his collaborators in carrying out one or more collective actions that can be recorded on video. An attempt was made to produce a video based on this series, but it was not completed. He therefore decided to compile the images and use the results in a new project, as the background to a sequence that can be read almost like sheet music. He wrote about it in 2002: 'While the book was being produced, I was thinking of a text by Pier Paolo Pasolini in which he talks about film scripts as a structure that refers to another structure. Similarly, based on the idea that it was impossible to produce a new video, I saw this book as a way of tackling the issue in a different way'.

Isabel Tejeda