Sueños

138 x 210 mm
160 pages
Design: Setanta

Itziar Okariz records her dreams as soon as she wakes up, writing down the lingering memories of the images she still holds. Sometimes she draws or sketches them. "Transcribing dreams has been—and still is—a way to produce my own words." These words become her tools, the material underlying her performances in recent years, structured through voice, subtraction of elements, and repetition.

We all dream, and we all recognize the stories and images. Dreaming is an inevitable and shared action, like breathing, like urinating. It’s a physical act that is also a cultural and social construction.

Sueños brings together all the texts from these performances and goes even further: it delves into the artist’s unwritten notebook, into her unread and unheard dreams, her latest dreams, and inevitably, her latest nightmares. Together, they form a book of unexpected poetic power, a gateway into the universe of Itziar Okariz: references, family, friends, artistic environment, cities, works, turmoil, and voids.

These dreams could be diaries, letters, poems, drawings, or scores. They are just dreams—material that becomes writing.

Itziar Okariz (Donostia, 1965) is an artist who works within the framework of action and performance, questioning the normativity of language and the production of signs that define us. Her work—performances, actions, videos, installations, and text pieces—demonstrates a form of dissidence while examining the connections between territory, body, ritual, sexuality, and semiotics. Her works have been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions, including Unquiet Objects (Disjecta, Portland, 2021); Moving Words (Rimi Scenekunst, Stavanger, 2021); Bodies of Water (13th Shanghai Biennale, 2020); Perforado por (Spanish Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale, 2019, with Sergio Prego); I Never Said Umbrella (Tabakalera, Donostia, 2018); Una construcción... (CA2M, Madrid, 2018); Idiorritmias (MACBA, Barcelona, 2017); and Itziar Okariz (Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, 2017). She also maintains an active pedagogical practice and lives between New York and Bilbao.