RELEVO / RELIEF
ESPACIO DE CREACIÓN GARAION
( AMAIA GABILONDO, JULI PÉREZ )
L'animal a l'esquena (Celrà)
From 27/07/2026 to 01/08/2026
A residency for communication and reflection by Amaia Gabilondo and Juli Pérez from the team Garaion.
The word “relief” comes from the Latin “relevare": to lift up again, lighten the load, support with many hands what a single one cannot. It originates in a friendly, almost intimate gesture, that of sharing a load so that a journey can continue. As time went by, this act became change, subsitution, movement; bringing in the relief like someone being passed a torch that doesn’t go out. The word relief comes with all its meanings, of relief in a post, relief-work in carving, and lightening of a burden, all of them related to the idea of sustaining, handing on or transforming a shared load.
For the team at the Garaion centre for creation, art and nature (www.garaion.eus), relief appears as a need to stop and contemplate the path they have travelled. After twenty years of activity, supporting processes, mee-tings and creation, they feel a desire to understand what all this experience has meant, what it has brought to the artists, the environment, and to the cultural eco-system around them. This pause is for a moment of care and reflection, a time to ask themselves what deserves to be kept, what told and what can be changed.
This process will take shape through a residency by the members of the Garaion team at L’animal a l’esquena, a legendary and much-loved space. This involves a physical and symbolic move from the Atlantic to the Medi-terranean, uniting two creation spaces in rural settings that are connected by long histories of experience.
It is essential to meet up with other people working in the same field: to pause together, talk, share experiences and take a closer look at what creation spaces are and have been. At this meeting, memories will unfold, intuiti-vely, emotionally and from experience, giving proper value to the margins, the minorities and the intersections to be found in these places. Voices will be collected in recordings, drawings and personal maps that, when gathered together, will make an archive of shared wisdom.
In this way, relief ceases to be seen as substitution and begins to feel like a process of conscious transforma-tion, a way to carry on building on what we have learnt.
Garaion is a creation space in the Basque Country that promotes creative processes, research and experiment by artists and creatives so that they can be shared with the community, so as to socialise creative experience, and to encourage the development of artistic capability in the Basque Country and so enrich the collective Bas-que imagination in the field of artistic creation and cultural production. It is located 15km from Vitoria, in an amazing natural environment.
Socialising creativity, taking responsibility for the improvement of nature, through programmes dedicated to nature, art and participation, revitalising old jobs so as to bring these skills back into the communtiy and legiti-mise them as part of our intangible cultural heritage - these are our foundations. A space for continuous lear-ning, through participatory processes to make new, innovative paths based on sharing traditional wisdom with mistresses and masters of basket weaving, bioconstruction, cookery etc. We are happy that all this is done in Basque.
Residency in collaboration with Azala Arts Centre as part of the programme Tapete Común of arts centres in rural spaces:
Azala Espacio de creación a La Sierra, Vitoria
L’animal a l’esquena, Celrà, Gerona
EiMA Creació, Maria de la Salut, Mallorca
A Casa Vella, Amiadoso, Orense.
Started in 2015, Tapete Común has created a dialogue based not only on the programmes of each centre, but also in relation to what it means to claim and defend an arts centre in small towns as opposed to the cities that take up most of the resources for production and research in performance. From year to year we have consoli-dated this programme for exchange and reflection.
ESPACIO DE CREACIÓN GARAION
( AMAIA GABILONDO, JULI PÉREZ )
L'animal a l'esquena (Celrà)
From 27/07/2026 to 01/08/2026
A residency for communication and reflection by Amaia Gabilondo and Juli Pérez from the team Garaion.
The word “relief” comes from the Latin “relevare": to lift up again, lighten the load, support with many hands what a single one cannot. It originates in a friendly, almost intimate gesture, that of sharing a load so that a journey can continue. As time went by, this act became change, subsitution, movement; bringing in the relief like someone being passed a torch that doesn’t go out. The word relief comes with all its meanings, of relief in a post, relief-work in carving, and lightening of a burden, all of them related to the idea of sustaining, handing on or transforming a shared load.
For the team at the Garaion centre for creation, art and nature (www.garaion.eus), relief appears as a need to stop and contemplate the path they have travelled. After twenty years of activity, supporting processes, mee-tings and creation, they feel a desire to understand what all this experience has meant, what it has brought to the artists, the environment, and to the cultural eco-system around them. This pause is for a moment of care and reflection, a time to ask themselves what deserves to be kept, what told and what can be changed.
This process will take shape through a residency by the members of the Garaion team at L’animal a l’esquena, a legendary and much-loved space. This involves a physical and symbolic move from the Atlantic to the Medi-terranean, uniting two creation spaces in rural settings that are connected by long histories of experience.
It is essential to meet up with other people working in the same field: to pause together, talk, share experiences and take a closer look at what creation spaces are and have been. At this meeting, memories will unfold, intuiti-vely, emotionally and from experience, giving proper value to the margins, the minorities and the intersections to be found in these places. Voices will be collected in recordings, drawings and personal maps that, when gathered together, will make an archive of shared wisdom.
In this way, relief ceases to be seen as substitution and begins to feel like a process of conscious transforma-tion, a way to carry on building on what we have learnt.
Garaion is a creation space in the Basque Country that promotes creative processes, research and experiment by artists and creatives so that they can be shared with the community, so as to socialise creative experience, and to encourage the development of artistic capability in the Basque Country and so enrich the collective Bas-que imagination in the field of artistic creation and cultural production. It is located 15km from Vitoria, in an amazing natural environment.
Socialising creativity, taking responsibility for the improvement of nature, through programmes dedicated to nature, art and participation, revitalising old jobs so as to bring these skills back into the communtiy and legiti-mise them as part of our intangible cultural heritage - these are our foundations. A space for continuous lear-ning, through participatory processes to make new, innovative paths based on sharing traditional wisdom with mistresses and masters of basket weaving, bioconstruction, cookery etc. We are happy that all this is done in Basque.
Residency in collaboration with Azala Arts Centre as part of the programme Tapete Común of arts centres in rural spaces:
Azala Espacio de creación a La Sierra, Vitoria
L’animal a l’esquena, Celrà, Gerona
EiMA Creació, Maria de la Salut, Mallorca
A Casa Vella, Amiadoso, Orense.
Started in 2015, Tapete Común has created a dialogue based not only on the programmes of each centre, but also in relation to what it means to claim and defend an arts centre in small towns as opposed to the cities that take up most of the resources for production and research in performance. From year to year we have consoli-dated this programme for exchange and reflection.
