Vulnerario

138 x 210 mm
352 pages
Design: Setanta

This is the confession of a compulsive informant who, breaking the rules of hide and seek, peeks while counting; an addict to language who, with one eye on the page and the other on the world, squeezes reality until it is strangled, exposing himself and others in the process, carefully hidden as cases through which he analyzes the complexity of the action-paralysis binomial in life and art.

Vulnerario arises from discomfort and unfolds a reflection on the artistic act that stems from an unsatisfactory relationship with that reality and its limits. It is a dissection of the everyday that allows for seeing, as being an artist —Jon Mikel Euba explains— is less about speaking than about seeing, about making things visible. This book is an experiment completed against itself, narrating the struggle with writing and revealing a particular method of creation at the intersection of the individual and the shared. Through the figure of the "contrastante," it also functions as a cartography of the artist's artistic context. Vulnerario diagnoses an ailment while also serving as the tool for its cure.

Jon Mikel Euba (Amorebieta, 1967) is a visual artist who, since the late 1990s, has developed a set of production systems based on an economic technique, with drawing as a process and sculpture as a program. His practice, seen as a form of resistance, has led him to engage in projects that merge performance with pedagogy, where the artist acts as mediator or filter. Notable projects include Primer Proforma at MUSAC (2010) and the Kalostra school in San Sebastián (2015). Between 2014 and 2017, he directed the master’s program Action Unites, Words Divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the Dutch Art Institute, whose sessions are compiled in the book Writing Out Loud. His work has been widely exhibited and is part of both national and international collections and institutions. In recent years, Jon Mikel Euba has focused on writing with the aim of defining a technical theory through which to reflect on artistic practice.

"As a child, I was told about the system used to create passable paths in the mountains: loading a donkey with a heavy weight and setting it loose toward the summit. The donkey, an animal that masterfully conserves energy, always zigzagged, tracing paths as horizontal as possible. The track was the result of an equation that included an obstacle (the slope), an objective (overcoming the incline), an instrument (the donkey), a reward (a carrot), and an extra element (the load). In the artistic process, similarly, to generate a form, the artist only has intuition, advising them to overload a structure with a great amount of material (real, ideal, and vital). What’s specific about this action is that (1) the artist takes on all roles: donkey, slope, load, track, and carrot, and (2) no form —in itself— guarantees achieving meaning." (Jon Mikel Euba)