We went up to the lighthouse like someone climbing into a story. A procession of souls in suspense, the roar of the gale and the candid illusion that this, for a day, would be
The Mysterious Island
or
The Treasure Island
or the scene of a horror
island
, the kind in which the last of the line between menacing bushes and the squawking of seagulls. Only Hitchcock was missing. The lighthouse house, the lighthouse on the island of Santa Clara, and the path that leads there, first by sea, then by land, go a long way. Disturbing stories, dreams of whalers and whales and that contemplation of the city, so different when viewed from the island. Cristina Iglesias (San Sebastián, 1956) has also been given a lot. Exactly to
return to the scene of the crime
; In other words, a little less
noir,
to return to his city and plant in the bowels of the earth, but in the middle of La Concha Bay, his most important work on a personal level and undoubtedly one of the most ambitious in terms of artistic and technical.
Hondalea
It means in Basque —although it is a disused term whose origin dates back to seventeenth-century writings— “abyss in the sea” or “bottom of the sea”. It is the title chosen by the San Sebastian sculptor to baptize her new creature, a colossal 15-ton bronze vase that, embedded in the guts of Santa Clara and in what was the lighthouse house, uninhabited since 1968, recreates the stratification of the seabed and the crashing of the waves against the rocks. It is a poetic but at the same time furiously realistic expression of Iglesias' constant interest in everything that has to do with geology.
The genesis of the project dates back to January 2016. The artist then received from the mayor, Eneko Goia, the Tambor de Oro, the highest distinction awarded by the San Sebastian City Council coinciding with the great local festival, the endless parade of Tamborradas of the Day of San Sebastián. The city has, if you start at the foot of Mount Igueldo and follow the sea line to Mount Ulía, with a small constellation of stars of art and architecture in the open air: the
Peine del Viento
and the
Tribute to Fleming
,
by Eduardo Chillida;
the sculpture
Five Plates Counter Clockwise
, by Richard Serra, in the gardens of the Miramar Palace;
the monumental
Empty Construction,
by Jorge Oteiza, on Paseo Nuevo, and the Kursaal, by Rafael Moneo, on Zurriola beach.
So the mayor told the artist that it couldn't be that, being from San Sebastian, she was missing from that showcase.
No sooner said than done.
Cristina Iglesias thought about it and ended up donating
Hondalea
to the city where she was born.
And he chose Santa Clara.
You just had to make it happen ...
The bronze magma of 'Hondalea' is a 15-ton sculpture made up of more than fifty pieces.Jose Yosigo / EPS
Five years later, the work is finished. Its opening to the public - free admission, prior registration on the Fundación Cristina Enea website and groups of 15 people (there is no access possible for people with disabilities who require a wheelchair) - is scheduled for next June 5. Before, on days 3 and 4, the San Sebastián Aquarium will host the international symposium
The rocky coast: ecology, art and geology
.
And the San Telmo Museum will open on the 3rd, for a period of four months, an exhibition that will document the creative process of the work through photographs, images and texts.
Hondalea
you will also have your movie.
The Gipuzkoan filmmaker Asier Altuna has filmed this entire process since September 2019.
His goal is to have a first viewing cut in July.
His wish is to premiere the documentary at the next San Sebastian Festival in September.
An artist facing the sea
It is not the first time that the author of the doors of the Prado Museum and the Tres Aguas project in Toledo confronts her work with the sea.
In 2010 he already installed his
submerged Estancias
at the bottom of the Sea of Cortez (Baja California, Mexico), where he had the collaboration of biologists and oceanographers, and which generated a refuge for underwater life that in turn was transforming the work through weather.
Long before (1993-1994) he had already acted on the rock of the Lofoten Islands, in the Norwegian Sea.
But
Hondalea
it is something else. Now everything seems easy. Now, when one enters the house of the Santa Clara lighthouse and looks out at that impressive twisted bronze grotto from the walkway that surrounds it, the aesthetic power of the work occupies almost everything and does not allow one to stop to think about each and every one of the technical, artistic and human ingredients that have taken part in this creative process. A sculptor and her assistants have worked here, workers from a foundry (Alfa Arte, from Eibar), a helicopter transport company (Helitrans Pyrinees, whose founding partner, Haritz Galarraga, from Donostia, died in July 2020 in an accident near the Catalan town of La Seu d'Urgell), another for civil engineering (Moyua), another for hydraulic engineering (Giroa), a study of cultural management (Artingenium,with the former director of the Arco fair and the Alhóndiga de Bilbao Lourdes Fernández at the head), a sea transport company (Motoras de la Isla, with the incombustible Julián Isturiz on board the
Aitona Julián III,
three generations taking passengers to the island since 1942); the entire team of the Donostiarra mayor Eneko Goia, as well as the public and private institutions that have co-financed the work, such as the San Sebastián City Council itself, the Gipuzkoa Provincial Council, the San Sebastián 2016 Foundation or the Banco de Sabadell.
The raison d'être of this artistic project, whose budget is around 4.5 million euros, is to recreate before the eyes of the visitor the impact of the waves against the marine rocks, in what is a sensory experience where contemplation intersects, the sound, the smell and the journey, and that starts in the same San Sebastian dock when the visitor gets on the boat. A fresh water circuit from an underground reservoir-cistern located nine meters below the sea enters the sculpture every 20 minutes. The immense bronze vase received a lacquer treatment to cope with the continuous impact of the water: three layers of varnish and above it a waxing with microcrystalline materials. "That is the illusionistic capacity of a work like this ..., I love it when people, in their heads, believe that it is the sea",explains Cristina Iglesias leaning on the railing of the catwalk that is going to give her work, somewhat stunned by a blow that occurred the day before against a door and by the five stitches in the head ...
Report on the Donostiarra artist Cristina Iglesias and her work in the lighthouse of Santa Clara Island in San Sebastión. Jose Yosigo / EPS
Between reality and fiction
Hondalea
is a fiction inspired by reality, with impossible elements, as in stories, but dictated by nature.
One is in front of that metallic magma full of mysterious nooks and crannies and one remembers a Mordor from
The Lord of the Rings
passed through water, and from
Journey to the center of the Earth
, and of certain paintings by Anselm Kiefer, and of the volcanic soil of Timanfaya and of the abyssal fish and even of those constructions of wet sand that you made on the beach.
Actually, none of that: we are in a sea cave where the sea explodes every so often against the rocks, in a brutally real poetry, the same that nature usually writes there in front of it on rainy days.
Nature writing verses.
Walt Whitman would have liked to be here.
There is like a hunch in Cristina Iglesias.
You already have few doubts about it:
Hondalea
it is the most important work of his career. Sure it is on a personal level for obvious reasons, but most likely it is also from a technical point of view. A process of creation and transport of pieces (fifty helicopter trips from the Paseo Nuevo in San Sebastian to the island) that have not exactly been paths of roses. Its author paints the portrait of a work that is already finished like this: “Having been able to choose the lighthouse house on the island of Santa Clara is something exceptional for me. The context here is unique. I have made plant fictions, also volcanic, but this is the most geological of all, and I have always been very interested in geology, I am an artist who comes from science and research ”.
The lighthouse house on the San Sebastian island of Santa Clara, in the middle of La Concha bay. The building had been in disuse since 1968.Jose Yosigo / EPS
Why the island? It was neither the first nor the only option for Cristina Iglesias once the possibility of choosing a place was opened to her, the one she wanted. Mount Ulía, which leans over the Gros neighborhood and Zurriola beach, and especially the English Cemetery, on Mount Urgullo — on certain days, one of the most disturbing and melancholic places imaginable— , they were in his head too. "But one day I woke up in bed, my head clicked and I said to myself: 'It's the island.' And it was the island. The isolation component, of something remote but so close to the city, a public space that belongs to everyone but not so well known, to give that space back to the people, and also the idea of that abyss, deep within the sea, that idea of taking care of the landscape and the sea ..., and all that inside a house,and that all that is a sculpture ”.
The idea seemed, it must be said, a real hot potato for the person who had given the artist carte blanche: the mayor of San Sebastián, Eneko Goia. Thinking about digging 10 meters deep there, completely rehabilitating an uninhabited and dilapidated building since 1968, removing the cover, putting a 15-ton bronze creature there and assembling its 54 pieces as if it were a giant meccano, and all that. working in a very complicated context such as an island lacking large surfaces and large access points, it seemed enough of an argument to drive the city's municipal corporation crazy.
“The management of the project has been tortuous,” acknowledges Goia (PNV) in his office in the town hall, “not with the artist at all, but with the paperwork, the transfer documents, the financial effort, some movement in opposition to the project. , as is usual in this city ..., but since I was with Cristina in her studio in Madrid, looking at the sketches, I was very clear on the subject.
It is an intervention in a remote, unusual and symbolic environment ”.
He still remembers the day the sculptor told him: "Mayor, you will say that I am crazy, I want the lighthouse house."
And he did.
The sculptor from San Sebastian, in front of one of the alabaster plates with which she has covered the windows of the lighthouse house.Jose Yosigo / EPS
For Iglesias, as for ordinary mortals, the last year has not been an easy year. In her case, in addition, the experience was even more bitter, since in February 2020 her partner, the businessman Plácido Arango died, 19 years after having lost her husband and father of her two children, the sculptor Juan Muñoz. But the shadows of the duel were joined by the lights of artistic creation. Without fainting. “In the year of the break, I have not been able to stop. I had to go to Saint-Tropez, where I had to finish a work under contract. Then I traveled to Houston in November and the State Department had to give us a special permit. We would go from the hotel to the construction site, in extreme security conditions for three weeks ”. Then came Lisbon. There, Iglesias is doing a piece in a park that is an urban planning action in the city,near the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Spanish Embassy. "It is a project on the water table, which is also something I have worked on a lot, something between fiction and reality, culture and nature," he says. But the thing does not end there. He has another ongoing project in Qatar. "Of which I can not talk much", warns. And another at the Royal Academy in London: "A temporary work that I will inaugurate in June and that will last six months, a pavilion with vegetation around it." Finally, in the park of Madison Square Garden in New York, he is setting up a project that will remain there for six months. And in Düsseldorf (Germany) he opens an exhibition at the Thomas Schutte Foundation, the Skulpturenhalle. "And a piece in a public park in Malta that I will open in October."which is also something that I have worked on a lot, something between fiction and reality, culture and nature ”, he says. But the thing does not end there. He has another ongoing project in Qatar. "Of which I can not talk much", warns. And another at the Royal Academy in London: "A temporary work that I will inaugurate in June and that will last six months, a pavilion with vegetation around it." Finally, in the park of Madison Square Garden in New York, he is setting up a project that will remain there for six months. And in Düsseldorf (Germany) he opens an exhibition at the Thomas Schutte Foundation, the Skulpturenhalle. "And a piece in a public park in Malta that I will open in October."which is also something that I have worked on a lot, something between fiction and reality, culture and nature ”, he says. But the thing does not end there. He has another ongoing project in Qatar. "Of which I can not talk much", warns. And another at the Royal Academy in London: "A temporary work that I will inaugurate in June and that will last six months, a pavilion with vegetation around it." Finally, in the park of Madison Square Garden in New York, he is setting up a project that will remain there for six months. And in Düsseldorf (Germany) he opens an exhibition at the Thomas Schutte Foundation, the Skulpturenhalle. "And a piece in a public park in Malta that I will open in October.""Of which I can not talk much", warns. And another at the Royal Academy in London: "A temporary work that I will inaugurate in June and that will last six months, a pavilion with vegetation around it." Finally, in the park of Madison Square Garden in New York, he is setting up a project that will remain there for six months. And in Düsseldorf (Germany) he opens an exhibition at the Thomas Schutte Foundation, the Skulpturenhalle. "And a piece in a public park in Malta that I will open in October.""Of which I can not talk much", warns. And another at the Royal Academy in London: "A temporary work that I will inaugurate in June and that will last six months, a pavilion with vegetation around it." Finally, in the park of Madison Square Garden in New York, he is setting up a project that will remain there for six months. And in Düsseldorf (Germany) he opens an exhibition at the Thomas Schutte Foundation, the Skulpturenhalle. "And a piece in a public park in Malta that I will open in October."And in Düsseldorf (Germany) he opens an exhibition at the Thomas Schutte Foundation, the Skulpturenhalle. "And a piece in a public park in Malta that I will open in October."And in Düsseldorf (Germany) he opens an exhibition at the Thomas Schutte Foundation, the Skulpturenhalle. "And a piece in a public park in Malta that I will open in October."
"But someone will have to pay you overtime, right?"
—Don't make me laugh, my stitches hurt.
"Well, while everyone has stopped, you haven't stopped."
And also in a year that has not been easy for you personally, has it?
—Yes, the truth is that I have lived very hard experiences, but it has also led me to very special moments… I believe that all this is teaching us to value time and certain things more.
—Every day seems more than time and silence are the supreme values, right?
-Total.
And that is something very important in my work, introducing time as part of it, as a language, seeing how things change, waiting for it.
08/10/2020 - Reconditioning and installation of the work of Cristina Iglesias in the house of the lighthouse on the island of Santa Clara, in Donosti - © López de ZubiríaLópez de Zubiría / EPS
And speaking of time and silence: what would
good old José Manuel Andoin
have thought of
Hondalea
? The truth is that you would have the right to have an opinion. He was the last lighthouse keeper in Santa Clara. Sorry, the last mechanical maritime signal technician in Santa Clara, before the lighthouse was automated. He lived in that house for 24 years, from 1944 to 1968, together with his mother, Doña María, and a mule they had,
Massiel
. The chronicles tell - and among them, the precious short film
Ur Artean
(Between waters), by Jesús Mari Palacios and Iñigo Jiménez— that Andoin, a native of Santoña (Cantabria), was the Spanish shooting champion and that he participated in four Olympic Games (London, Rome, Tokyo and Mexico). That he was withdrawn and trained shooting on the island. They say that his mother was something like the San Sebastian version of Norman Bates's mother. That tormented him. In 1968 they left the house of the lighthouse because Andoin was transferred to the one in Igueldo, located opposite. After a year, the mother died. Soon, José Manuel Andoin shot himself. Hondalea is also the memory of those who, like him, or like the lepers who were isolated in Santa Clara when the plague of 1597, or like the monks who founded the hermitage on the top of the island in the 14th century, lived there, above, between time and the silence of the lighthouse house.