Jon Mikel Euba. Kill’em all

The works produced by Jon Mikel Euba (Bilbao, 1967) over the last year which, under the generic title of K.Y.D. KILL’EM ALL, form the core of this project, include drawings, murals, publications, photographs and videos (KYDNAPPING, K.Y.D., KONTUZ KYD) representing faces and bodies: paralysed bodies, in a territory somewhere between sleep and death.

[…] As a constructor of images – in any medium and often in several at once -, he uses his body and his friends’ bodies and faces as a working material, and his everyday environment is the stage where he gives shape to his particular obsessions. […] The search would come more from an intense process of subjectivisation of his experience, from a special relation with the situations and moments that make up his imaginary and a genuine passion for relating the intervals, the pauses, the necessary theatricality of human relations in images. Mechanical recording, the reproduction/multiplication of images, mural drawing or monumental writing are superimposed in an intensive output that also has its origin in memory, the archive of gestures, places and images, fixed and in motion, which Euba isolates and which, mutilated, recomposed or recontextualised, will reappear transformed in his fictions. […] K.Y.D. KILL’EM ALL partakes of those incomplete images and stories; the fictional element is often not resolved; the dramatic tension is maintained because the drama never quite comes. Through repetition, close-ups and the movements of the camera, Euba makes us simultaneous protagonists, prowlers like him: we observe, we spy furtively in search of something, and the anxiety grows because the stories he is hinting at are closely related to the psychological representation of violence. […] His whole output has had a spatial and cultural reference point, the Basque Country, and especially the complex landscape of Bilbao and the surroundings. […] Euba’s case is paradigmatic for his way of working within that natural, cultural, social and political landscape in a state of permanent ambiguity. And of course because his analysis of violence is set at the heart of his work. The first thing one notices on seeing his work in perspective is the expressive capacity, the iconic power given off by his settings, normally the lonely spaces of the woods around his city. He has frequently said that “as opposed to the American system of image production, which has imposed a landscape on the world, I try to apply the same thing to a landscape I know well and which I regard as still being untapped from a merely iconic point of.” […] That iconic power includes the city suburbs and communication centres, which make up a complex and far from idyllic territorial reality. […] Euba is well aware that violence has nothing to do with the noise and action-packed images of the television series; that real violence is repressed tension, that it must be silenced and has more to do with the establishment of precise situations of tension and sustained waiting than the sparking of aggressive action. […] The interest of the verse by Ramón Gómez de la Serna: “Two in a car: romance. Three: adultery. Four: kidnapping. Five: crime. Six: shooting with the police”, that Euba uses in this project, lies according to him, “on the one hand, in the cinematic nature of the text, since it corresponds to the movement of a zoom opening up. I like the idea that, the more information we are given, the better we understand the situation it refers to, but at the same time each movement in time denies the meaning of the previous image.” […]

Excerpts from the text by Nuria Enguita Mayo, “Settings Without Text”, Jon Mikel Euba. KILL’EM ALL (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies; Vitoria-Gasteiz: ARTIUM; Murcia: Región de Murcia. Dirección de Proyectos e Iniciativas Culturales. Murcia Cultural, S.A., 2003): 129-133.