Next to the photo of Joan Mari Torrealdai, Oier Guillan of Metrokoadroka, the mayor of Agurtzane Solabarrieta Usurbil and Haritz Azurmendi of Jakino, the coordinator of the scholarship. /
The project has a “solid starting point”, according to the jury: which part of the memory and which reference to fill, looking to the future, the archive that was emptied of Torrealdai when he was arrested?
The first edition of the scholarship created in honor of the late Joan Mari Torreladai by the Usurbil City Council and the Jakin Foundation will bring a work by the Metrokoadroka Collective, as the ‘Bare Archive’ submitted by them was the chosen proposal, as announced this Wednesday in Usurbil. They will receive a prize of 14,000 euros and they will have 18 months to develop the project and present it to the public.
13 projects have been submitted to the first edition of the JMT research grant “which included a variety of perspectives”. The jury, made up of Maialen Akizu, Eduardo Apodaka, Ibai Iztueta and Ainara Lasa, unanimously decided to award the ‘Bare Archive’ project, after evaluating all the proposals very well.
At the event announcing the decision, Agurtzane Solaberrieta Mesa, the mayor of Usurbil, recalled that “the grant was born out of the vocation of Usurbildi to make another contribution to the Basque Country, with the intention of deepening what Torrealdai did all his life: in research, town planning and dissemination, looking to the future”. That will be the next step: “embodying the winning project, filling it with substance and then offering it to the people”.
Haritz Azurmendi, a member of Arrue Jakin and coordinator of the scholarship, emphasized the participation, both in terms of numbers and levels: “We asked for an exercise to focus on the Basque culture of the future and the proposals addressed the question of transmission, the opportunities to sew the network of cultural creators, the participation and visibility of citizens, innovative practices… ».
An archive of the future
Regarding the awarded project, in the opinion of the jury, “the starting point itself is very strong”. The Metroquadroka Collective has taken as its starting point a dark experience of Joan Mari Torrealdai: during the arrests, among many other things, her archive was stolen. It is significant, the path chosen to fill that archive that was left empty: “The question, what would be the pieces of memory that would be recovered for the future, with what cultural references of the past and present fill that future archive”.
Collective member Oier Guillan thanked, on behalf of the group, for the opportunity and vision offered by the scholarship, and stated that their project started from the need to turn the documentation, which is considered a look at the past, into the future, to become “documentation”.
In addition, the grant “gave special importance to the dissemination of research, and in addition to the theater performance pieces created specifically by the winners, they have also set up workshops to give the citizens tools and put their own pieces on”.
As Solaberrieta recalled, the municipality and Jakin signed a cooperation agreement this year, for four years, and they will call every two years: the first year will be to carry out the research, and the second, to socialize the work. The city council will allocate 15,000 euros each year to publicize the project resulting from the call for grants and research, and Jakin will be responsible for the management of the grant.