Hommage à Kaixa (Homage to Kaixa) (2025)
Artist’s book Archive box (Bizkaia Provincial Government), recordable sound chip module
38 x 31 x 11,5 cm. Recording on loop 13”
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2025.632.1
Yon Matauko’s work questions modes of spatial appropriation through apparent forms of contamination, exploring how notions of cleanliness and dirtiness function as psychosocial mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. In Hommage à Kaixa (Homage to Kaixa), time folds in on itself, encapsulating marginalized voices in a seemingly absurd conceptual loop. Encased in an archival box, the book includes a sound chip that plays a cryptic phrase in Mandarin, voiced by a Bilbao-based Chinese woman – an homage, in essence, to that which lingers as matter out of place.
Yon Matauko (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1987) navigates the border between radical gestures and the lazy comfort of late capitalism; between trash and art; left and right; right and wrong. A change agent whose artistic-spatial practice examines the psychosocial factors involved in processes of cleanliness and dirt, understood as mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion. Matauko’s work also explores the role of human and non-human fluids in spatial appropriation. Currently, Matauko is focusing his research on geographies of exclusion and border transgression, investigating how fear of moral and physical contamination shapes the creation of physical and symbolic boundaries. Within this framework, Matauko is examining the HIV/AIDS crisis in the Basque Country, exploring paradigms between hygienist policies and dissident experiences during the 1980s and 1990s.