Exhibition: «Nobody Can Share the Flavour of Mint (Colección BilbaoArte)» at URIBITARTE40

On November 22, 2024, the URIBITARTE40 Hall will open its doors to a new collection exhibition curated by Íñigo Villafranca Apesteguia and Lorenzo Galgó. The opening of the collective exhibition, entitled “Nobody Can Share the Flavour of Mint”, will be at 7:00 p.m. The exhibition can be visited until February 2.

Nobody Can Share the Flavour of Mint is the first exhibition on the BilbaoArte Collection produced as part of a curatorial call to showcase the artists in the collection, and provide new readings and interpretations of the mindset of the works and artists overall. The initiative seeks to create a support line for the professionals of the cultural and artistic sector to produce curatorial projects.

Iñigo Villafranca Apesteguia and Lorenzo Galgó, the curators selected for this first edition, have unveiled an exhibition project that addresses the complexity of a contemporary art collection from the problem of the name and its workability as a tool. Naming allows a stable narrative to be stipulated, along with an image to control the materials making up that set.

The approach draws on the description of mint to illustrate this problem; it is a perennial aromatic plant, with a thin and erect stem, which grows up to 60 cm high and whose leaves give off a particular scent. Mint is a flavour that is identified as fresh and sweet, that causes a tingling sensation in one’s mouth. William Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet (1594), also considered the problem of the name when he wrote: “that which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet”.

We use the name not only to be able to talk about things, but also to exercise control over what we need to name. Words create ways of bonding with the characteristics of the materials that they denote; they sometimes accompany them and, at others, they deny, superimpose or conceal them. If I wonder what mint is alike, I will end up in a vacuity that will tell me what mint already is, mint.

We cannot discern themes or approaches when we relate to materials that make up a diverse collection such as that of BilbaoArte. By contrast, we focus on the written information on the works that it assembles; their size, technique, name, artist and production date. Nobody Can Share the Flavour of Mint sees interpretation and translation as an act that is always political as regards what it hides and what it reveals.

This exhibition gathers together a variety of ways of thinking about how we relate to the artistic processes and to the world through the name. The first approach to an exhibition tends to be in this place, in this text, here. After warning about the danger of writing about things, we are about to do so.