San Sebastián dedicates a large exhibition to him in the middle of his career

In this way, an ephemeral cooperation is activated that becomes an analogy of the artistic and relational practice that informs the proposals and actions of Maider López. Curated by Aimar Arriola, the project is titled touch ita Basque word that refers to both the action of touching and that of affecting or emoting.

Precisely two of his actions, Touch the Museum2024, y Contours2024, appeal to that phenomenology of the senses that seeks a different knowledge of spaces, architectures or natural or urban landscapes. In addition, there are also bodies in action and their shared experiences.

This artist, who is in the middle of her career, has achieved rapid national and international recognition. through its presence in biennials and prestigious international centers. With the double meeting of their projects we can access several that had barely been shown or that are unpublished in our context.

All of them have as a constructive premise to investigate, in a genuine way, the poetic, ethical and political desire to give shape to the idea of ​​living togetheras he recognizes in a dialogue with Hans Ulrich Obrist that took place at the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao in 2020.

Maider says: “I invite people to create temporary collectivities by altering public space according to their way of living in it and relating to each other.” He thus exposes a complete synthesis of his poetics and the importance he attaches to the form of action. Only through it do aesthetic experiences and various meanings emerge.

For years it has been part of the heritage of the relational aesthetics that updates a postulate present in all the arts: producing community from non-identity. the traffic jam2005, was a call to go by car to a rural area with narrow roads and thus produce an anomalous situation: a traffic jam that migrates from the urban to the rural context.

Their projects are premised on investigating the poetic, ethical and political desire to give shape to the idea
to live together

An ironic action that activates ephemeral communities and a bundle of multiple critical meanings. This sensitivity is shown in a project carried out in Costa Rica, clean water to the river2024-2025, a naive act with diverse containers united, indexes of the plural community, which invites us to reflect on the ecological crisis.

It is known that the task of art is create new rules that establish other poetics and other modes of reception and experience. This purpose is recurring in López. Perhaps it is manifested in several specific interventions that the game of soccer has in common: one, Football Field2007, in the context of the Sharjah Biennial, caused a series of interferences in the use of public space and a disparity of aesthetic and recreational astonishments. The other, Polder Cup2010, in the Netherlands, takes place in an irregular terrain affected by floods that prevented the conventional practice of that sport, activating new challenges. Rules are modified in action due to their conditions of possibility.

The attention to plants and forests is recognized in other intelligent projects that assemble critical and aesthetic flashes. For example, Character2021: a woman transporting a plant who makes the same journey through Bilbao at the same time every day, over the course of an entire month, raises an amalgam of interactions and strangeness that disturb the daily experience. Or in the wonderful project Moving Garden2022, which documents a mass action: 750 people walk through the city carrying plants.

Las tensions between the public and the domestic and the vindication of plants in the urban context would invite us to a new reflection. Other works of notable value would be Archipelago2019, a photographic action where the community arises from the need to self-organize in the face of the changing forms of water. It would remind us that each human being is a fragmentary, complementary and constantly moving whole.

Mimicking the birds mimicking the waves2021, is a video installation showing a group of people moving with the tide on a beach. That attempt to adaptation to water movement It takes us back to the childhood experience of playing with the waves.

A successful investigation defines another project of interest: Grass Archeology2023-2025. And to refer to another fascinating piece that would astonish Georges Perec himself: Box of 120 colored pencils2017-2025, now shown for the first time. A minimal action, a tiny line on paper in a repeated and different gesture that makes up a large mural, until the lead of all the pencils is exhausted.