Bene Bergado: Degrow

Curated by Juan Luis Moraza.

With the title Degrow, sculptor Bene Bergado presents a specific exhibition project for the Azkuna Zentroa—Alhóndiga Bilbao Exhibition Hall. Closely tied to her return to Bilbao, this project combines biographical and ideological aspects for, as the author acknowledges, “going back to the past brings consistency to the present.”

The artist proposes the infinitive degrow against the unbounded exponential growth of production and consumption in our “developed societies,” the squandering of natural resources and the global effects of their exhaustion and degradation. Quoting Isabelle Stengers, “we’re terribly under-prepared to deal with what is happening.” The motto “live better with less” aims to liberate us from an economic model of scale, competitiveness and urgency that makes us dependent. It is intended to change this social imaginary where those of us living midst the luxuries of affluent societies always want more, and those who do not live in these affluent societies, would like to live the way we do. The artist warns us: “Degrow is inevitable either as an option or consequence of the collapse we are hurtling towards.” The exhibition installations and sculptures dialogue with the need for a deceleration through the awareness of limits in order to adapt ourselves to a near future of low energy and unavoidable changes in life. The idea of wealth should be redefined and acknowledged as a moral, intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction, and we should assume our responsibility as authors of the future.  

This exhibition, curated by artist Juan Luis Moraza, aims to convey that which is intrinsic in artistic creation, i.e. responsibility for our own life, responsibility for what we do and what we convey with it. Artistic creation rehearses this feeling of being and becoming capable, taking responsibility for and assuming the consequences. This call to action runs throughout the exhibition and, like an enormous diagram that articulates different codes and systems, it reveals its artistic processes and most explicit issues. 

Hence, degrow is not only the contents or an issue of this exhibition, but also and above all a commitment inherent to artistic experience. The creation processes involve a search for coherence among means and purposes, intentions and realisations, expression and action. Bene Bergado’s creation processes poetically incorporate the physicality and symbolic background of materials (whether recycled waste or noble recyclable materials, such as bronze), procedural transparency, formal configuration of works (assuming a transversal artistic inheritance), emotional sensitive experiences, biographical resonances, symbolic and reasoning factors, ideological and intellectual positioning, etc. Thus, works of art do not only represent the world but are also a specific channel of action in it. Furthermore, they make interdependence processes present, both among people and their ways of symbolising the world, and among what is human and the background to which they belong. They reveal a form of responsibility and attention towards life, and a way of intensifying and caring for something specific, something real. In this sense, degrow is an allusion to the containment and co-responsibility inherent to the artistic experience in which the works involve us. 

Bene Bergado: Born in Salamanca, Bene Bergado has lived and studied in Bilbao. Degrow means her return to the city where she took her first professional steps, with a project delving into questions already mentioned in previous works and where biographical and ideological aspects blend together. Bergado graduated in Fine Arts via the University of the Basque Country in 1985 and on completing her studies she began her career as an artist with a Scholarship from Bizkaia Professional Council in 1986. She became a professor at the Bilbao Faculty of Fine Arts in 1987. She took part in the 1992 Young Art Exhibition and the exhibition DISTANCE 0 curated by José Luis Brea in 1994. She moved to Madrid to live and work in 1998 after lecturing for 10 years at the UPV/EHU Faculty of fine Arts.

Azkuna Zentroa—Alhóndiga Bilbao. Bilbao Society and Contemporary Culture Centre
Azkuna Zentroa is the Bilbao Society and Contemporary Culture Centre, with a local and international perspective open to dialogue with different community groups. Azkuna Zentroa is a place to take part in culture as a practice, process and space for experiences, through six lines of programming: Visual arts, Performing Arts, Film and Audio-visuals, and Literature. All of which dialogue among themselves generating a hybrid, multiple and expanded programming that favors the formation and everyday life of the contemporary. Always with mediation and education as a way to generate critical knowledge and transform society through art and artists.