In the second of our 'Selected' series we shine the spotlight on Spanish born conceptual artist Elena Bajo who tells us about her recent work performed in the Moroccan desert and gives us an insight into the ideas that underpin her practice.

Tell us a bit about your artwork, and what you are currently working on.

I would say my work is conceptually constructed and I use a diversity of approaches and media to address historical, political or social issues attached to a specific site. I am interested in how power is structured and gets distributed in political, social and economic systems of the everyday. My work starts, and is established by a line of research, archeological theory and practice with engagement in what is found in a specific site and what is left or overlooked. This includes both material and ideas, the remains of what was once there. The investigation engages these leftovers with historical past and contemporary philosophical theories. By using abstraction and the poetic language, by performing these objects, this flow or movement is presented into different media, text, sculpture, performance, video and painting. My work explores how these systems organize and structure the everyday, and the articulation of power within this.

I am currently between exhibitions, with my solo exhibition The Object of a Movement, at D+T Project in Brussels having just finished. I have recently performed a piece of work in the Moroccan Desert which is part of an ongoing project entitled Universal Flag; a series of performative actions and demonstrations in the deserts of Morocco and California I have been carrying out since 2007, using a silver reflective material (mylar) as a flag. The banner is brandished and carries no message, it reflects the light and blows in the wind. I have also performed this at MUHKA, ANTWERP, as part of Love Letters to A Surrogate, organized by Warren Neidich and Lode Geens. On this occasion I worked with a surrogate, Belgian artist Vaast Colson, who followed my instructions to execute the piece and performed the action inside the museum with artificial light and artificial wind.

This work is connected to the idea of sending messages and receiving no reply, like the figure of a jester or a mentally insane person screaming out to the world, the ideas around “parrhesia” a term borrowed from Greek rhetoric meaning "to speak everything". It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk. It was an element of the politics of the democratic system in Athens, as well being used in theatre. Michel Foucault carries on the concept of parrhesia, saying that the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk in speaking the truth, with the belief this will benefit the community. I explore this idea in my practice using performance by the way of working with actors who are given a political text in which they choose which ‘truth’ they would speak up ( Plan for a Composition in Three Movements, The moon is a harsh Mistress, The Woodmill, London 2010). I also work with dancers who select which parts of the text to dance to, with writers who contribute their truth to a common project, or with the distribution and printing of a Manifesto (Unwritten Manifesto (Notes),and You say You want a Revolution (Production of Space)).

This idea is extended into presenting the idea of the ‘irrational’ by a way of working with animal gestures and movements ( No power for Nobody, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2008) or the absurdity of the activity of composing sculptures with discarded objects collected and re-collected on a never ending process…

What is your artistic background?

I come from Madrid, from a family of artists; my grandmother an actress and singer, my grandfather anarchist poet, my mother a dancer and my father a non-practising artist. Alongside this, two of my five siblings are artists. I studied MA Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins, London, and I have an MA in Architecture from Barcelona. I Moved to New York from Madrid, and I have been working and living in between New York, Berlin, London, Barcelona, Brussels, Madrid and Los Angeles. Work has lead this itinerant lifestyle, and at the same time this lifestyle has conditioned my practice and the way I make art, in turn, blurring the boundaries between my artwork and my life.

What is your working process, how do you get from idea to finished artwork?

The idea is the work is the idea is the work is the idea…the work is never finished… the presentation of the work shows different moments of interruption on the research, the conversation, the reflection and the thinking behind the piece. I pay attention to traces of materials that can connect to the issues I’m interested in, and they become materialized and reactivated by context and space after an exhaustive research period which also constitutes the work. The idea is externally linked to a place and a certain action or activity is taking place in that space, and it could be any space, and it could be that I present the work in that space or in a different one. There is constant exchange and flux, input and output, lots of fragmented information. I pay attention to the most subtle pieces of found material within the context, disposition and arrangement of the pieces of a possible puzzle…

Who or what has been the biggest influence on you?

I guess my family’s ambivalence and paradoxical situation, the idealistic take on life, and it’s reality. Being brought up in Madrid, in a working class family of both working parents, six kids, and living in grandmother in a small apartment, too small to have any kind of privacy…space constricted and economically constricted. I think the reality of this situation forced me to imagine a different reality, an idealistic situation connected to freedom of space.

The first images I remember seeing, and thinking they represented ‘the life I wanted’ were old sepia pictures from my grandmother and her sister (they were an artistic couple) on theatre stages around the world, with fabulous costumes. There were also pictures of my mother and her sister (they were also artistic couple) on fabulous and exotic sets, Paris, Turkey or Tangier and old glittering outfits buried and hiding from ‘the kids’ view. We, the kids, were not allowed access to this forbidden world, or the possibility to even think about being an artist. I would organize secret plays with my brothers and sisters using the closets as ‘time travel’ devices in which to make and design the costumes…

The initial stages of my work involved collaborating with my sister Delia Bajo (performance artist from Praxis artist collective) in performance projects, in which dancers, musicians and other artists were invited to participate. Our first project, a crossover with dance was exhibited in New York and was performed by dancers and actors recruited from an announcement placed in a newspaper. The performance consisted in a series of simultaneous actions, distributed in the different rooms in the gallery, inspired by the Living Theatre approach.

Growing up in Madrid, surrounded by my parents and grandparents in a country that was so psychologically damaged after forty years of Franco’s dictatorship, I developed an attitude against conformism that made me become an anarchist and atheist. As a consequence I’ve developed my interest to explore the kind of invisible systems that structure our ‘movements’ in the everyday and how I can highlight, and think about them and the possible alternatives; non hierarchical ways of resistance against them. My biggest inspiration come from advocates of this ‘free spirit”, political consciousness and its possible manifestations in artistic positions, philosophical, political or social, anarchist, atheist, pacifist, feminists, green-ecological movement, civil rights movements etc…

What’s next for you?

I am/will be working around the idea of a composition of texts that will become a book, and in turn, a script for performances, score for music and choreography for dance. This will generate sculptures, paintings, film and photography entitled ‘The Politics of the Everyday: The Anarchy of Performance, Objects, Spaces and Situations (Researching the Unarchived)” (working Title). This will generate the material for my next projects, one of them is a group show Uncommon Places: Reinventing the Everyday curated by Pieter Vermeulen at Extra City, Antwerp.

I am also working on two printed projects in collaboration with artist Warren Neidich, one is a magazine that will be published in Los Angeles, and the other one is a compilation of the work generated by EXHIBITION a temporary collective project, intitiated with artists Eric Angles, Nathalie Angles, Warren Neidich and Jakob Schillinger, realized in a vacant storefront in New York, in which more than one hundred of artists participated.

Image: The Horizon Line is Here (Tornare per Partire), Envoi 2 (Universal Flag), Film Still of performance in the Californian Dry Lake Desert, 2010, Silver gelatin print, wooden frame, cm 27 x 36, ed.1/3 , Courtesy Galleria Umberto di Marino, Naples

View Elena Bajo's art profile page

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