Carnage Visor VVV presents a visual record of artist Iñaki Garmendia’s extensive unpublished video and documentary material. Spanning 120 pages, including 23 documents that serve as markers, the book selects and arranges diverse materials into a continuous sequence based on four case studies: Faux départs: Mariaratz/Arkaka [also known as “video of the dam”], Villas Vascas, Fourteen-Years-Old-Runaway-Boy and Txitxarro/Bolueta Front 242.

As in his video works, here the relationships established by Garmendia between diverse materials –photographs, stills, texts, photocopies– and the unique sequencing of the book’s contents –from the Basque landscapes and architecture to the nighttime recording of a body inside a car or the series of photographs taken in the Txitxarro nightclub– allow for multiple readings. We bear witness to a series of events, some real and some enacted, whose meaning is disrupted. Faced with the aesthetic and referential universe created by Garmendia, the reader’s perception is key in establishing a narrative that gives them continuity.

The book also includes a fifth case study presented separately as an annex: a series of images of the intervention and exhibition project “Tramar lo gótico. N-634”, carried out in collaboration with BeAr Architects in Travesía de Tívoli (Bilbao) in November 2023.

Iñaki Garmendia (Ordizia, 1972) belongs to a generation of Basque artists who have carried out their work in a context marked by paradoxical trends: cultural nationalism and globalisation have provided the ingredients for an aesthetic in which diverse meanings often overlap. Video, music, youth subcultures and certain industrial products heighten the tension between the different readings of his work. His processes often begin with the creation of derivatives, versions of cultural objects to which he remains secretly attached and on which he works following a logic of attrition. This is most apparent in his video production over the past 20 years. The extensive footage with which he typically presents his works seems to plunge us into the very event captured by the camera. Despite this, his works remain opaque, void of a traditional narrative, and exist within some sort of abstraction reminiscent of one of the most basic principles of expanded cinema. Furthermore, his tendency towards punk-derived aesthetics lends a certain resistance to orality to his work. Overall, Garmendia’s works avoid an immediate ascription of meaning and reject the instrumentalization of presignified images and scenes.
 

ISBN: 978-84-09-61775-3
First edition, Dalpine, 2024
Images & editing: Iñaki Garmendia
Design: Pierre Hourquet
Printing: Artefacto 
Softcover
120 pages + 8-page annex
29x21 cm
Language: Spanish