"There are no Fires without Ashes" URTZI IBARGÜEN
 

I delve into musings, like an explorer in terra ignota, with a well-sharpened Marxist dart that could well have stopped the gloomy late-capitalist history that we have been experiencing in its relationship with technology in recent decades; namely: “Nature does not build machines, nor locomotives, nor railways, nor electric telegraphs. These are products of human industry: natural material, transformed into organs of the human will on nature or of its action in nature. They are organs of the human brain created by the human hand; objectified force of knowledge.

Delegating technology to replace the human and/or animal labor force is something indisputable today; work, at least the manual, (even that of artists) as we know it here and now, in the most ferociously neoliberal version that the fall of the Berlin wall came to accentuate, is doomed to disappear.

Indeed, in the work of Urtzi Ibarguen there is no physical-manual anthropic action, he ironically uses the computer as a mirror that reflects what we have become throughout all these centuries of humanistic project: data. That is; nothing more than symbolic referents of our appearance that the artist uses as a foundation to build another identity that adapts to the paradigms of a new historical stage characterized by a brutal techno-economic transformation and a conceptualization of society itself as a uniform network and not as a heterogeneous set of subjectivities.

In short, Urtzi's work is a product of radical socio-political imagination and a call to invent the future before it is implanted in us. They are small pieces that, well arranged, can erect cathedrals oriented towards the civilizational utopias of modernity, which proclaim a time to come common and without gods, a constructive “sindios” as the consummation of a people redeemed first, liberated later and vindicated now.