ATLAS#1, 2023
Acrylic on one-colour screen printing on 250g Canson edition paper.
80 x 60 cm
BilbaoArte Collection
Inventory No.: 2023.570-2.1
The starting point for ¿Por qué las viviendas obreras tienen hastiales de colores? [Why Don’t Working Class Houses Have Coloured Gables?] was the architecture of the housing cooperatives of the 1911-1936 Affordable Housing Act in Bizkaia. That legislation, under the aegis of Bizkaia Provincial Government and Bilbao City Council, proposed a series of measures to offset the unhealthy housing conditions that workers suffered; that was the direct consequence of the steel-making boom, which led to huge migration from the countryside to the city, where they were forced into hot bedding and extremely decrepit housing. After that legislation had been passed in 1911, Bilbao and its surrounding area witnessed houses being built under that law. One of the styles used for their frontages was inspired by Neo-Basque architecture, where patterns in common can be found and that generate cultural connections in order to achieve the quintessential image of the farmstead.
Jorge Isla (Huesca, 1992) graduated in audiovisual communication from San Jorge University, has a Master’s Degree in Artistic Production from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, and a Master’s Degree in Authored Photography Projects from Escuela Lens in Madrid. His art examines the economic, social and political mechanisms of contemporary society by subverting their status using dichotomies such as reality & fiction, cause & effect, and presence & absence. It represents a set of ideas based on the concepts of borders, reinterpreting and reattributing meaning to the conceptual object, underpinned by research using mixed mediums – writing, creation images, video and installation – according to the nature of each project.