A desert island: Lika (Deva Pereda Areizaga, 2023)

Audiovisual installation in the Nave 2 hall (Tabakalera).

Lika (Deva Pereda Areizaga, 2023)

This audiovisual installation takes us to the Bidasoa river and the border (between France and Spain) established on the territory it flows through. Lika is the name used by the people who live on the riverbank to refer to the mud that remains on its banks after the floods. Between the borders drawn by this imaginary line is Pheasant Island, a place of intermittent jurisdiction shared by the two states. 

In this search for forms of audiovisual representation, the installation explores the possible links between the political fictions of the legal language that define the geography of the border and the memory of the landscape that gives shape to this space.  

Based on three acts, a route is established that traverses different moments in the history of these texts: the oldest laws that establish the basis of how the border is determined; texts about the concept of threat and its justification for the permanent control of the area; and fragments where the police, the judiciary and the French government justify the need for continuous surveillance based on essentialist conceptions of human nature and the conditions of the landscape itself.  

The projection of legal texts on different parts of the river and its surroundings, accompanied by the filming of reflections of the river water, establish two different ways of approaching the relationship between the textual and the visual, like a fork in the river. The proximity of the camera seeks to inhabit the space in a simple way, from a place that makes it the opposite of surveillance, establishing a register based on the corporeal. 

* The presentation of Lika will take place on April 10 at 5:30 p.m. in the Plaza space (Tabakalera).

A desert island is a programme organised by EQZE's students of Film Curating Studies (2023-2024 Academic Year).