Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum, 2022/2023

Atlas of a paper empire

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This installation is the result of a year of work by the artistic couple formed by Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum.

Under the title Atlas of a paper empire they have made a tool to carry out an expedition to the map collection of the San Telmo Museum’s archive.

A robotic arm moves a camera across each document while taking hundreds of close-up photos.

The project explained by Jaio and van Gorkum:

"Imagine a map so perfect, that not a single detail of the territory that it covers is left out. Such a map should, according to the writer Jorge Luis Borges, contain a map of the map. And this map, in turn, a map of the map. And so on, on to infinity.

Most maps do not live up to this level of perfection. They are abstractions, graphic representations of the space we inhabit. Vast stretches of ocean, impenetrable forests and towering mountain ranges are reduced to mere planes and figures, and byzantine urban centres to a bunch of scribbles on a flimsy piece of paper. Like irreverent caricatures, they hardly seem able to offer more than an impoverished experience of the world.

But the true power of abstraction does not lie in its faithful reproduction of reality. A model also generates its own reality, without origin in outside references. So what if we imagine for a moment that the map is not preceded by the territory? What if it is the map itself which brings the territory into existence?"

It is with this idea in mind that the artists Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum have approached the collection of antique maps from the archive of the San Telmo Museum. None of them have been acquired for their topographic accuracy. Their value is historical and cultural, with copies dating from recent history all the way back to the Renaissance. Starting from simple floor-plans of the Dominican convent housing the museum, they stretch out to include the Basque provinces, the whole of Spain, and cross the oceans to touch upon the shores of the former colonies.

We are living among the vestiges of the world they chart. They speak of battles won and of empires lost. They speak of a time when the unknown could be subjugated by drawing new frontiers across it. A time of first encounters between civilizations, of violence and political exploitation. A time from which the very notion of the ethnographic museum would emerge. To explore these maps, is thus to explore the museum itself, and to understand how its concepts of collection, display, learning and spectacle might have evolved out of the legacy of colonialism.

The artists have built an instrument to assist them on this expedition: a robotic arm which moves a camera across each document while it takes hundreds of close-up photos. They have been working inside the museum’s collection depot, feeding their machine with every map they could get their hands on. The results have then been stitched together again into high resolution digital copies. The resolution of these images is so high, in fact, that one can start to distinguish details that escape the naked eye: fibres of paper, an oily fingerprint left behind by a careless lithographer, or little holes created by the museum’s arch enemy, the bookworm.

It would take a lifetime to navigate the maps at this level of detail. That is why the artists have developed a computer algorithm that autonomously plots a path across this virtual universe. Like a phantom satellite, it perpetually surveys a territory that is bound only by the limits of the museum’s own collection.

Inside this map of maps, you might eventually come across a map of the museum again. And inside this map, the figure of a spectator, lost in thought, contemplating his or her position relative to the world.

Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum

Iratxe Jaio (Markina-Xemein, 1976) and Klaas van Gorkum (Delft, Holland 1975) have been an artistic couple since 2001. Their practice could be compared to experimental archaeology. They explore the social meaning of existing objects and documents, through their appropriation and reproduction in a different context. They have participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in spaces such as the Artium Museum in Vitoria-Gasteiz; ADN Platform in Barcelona; FRAC-Aquitaine in Bordeaux; MUSAC in Leon; Tabakalera in Donostia/San Sebastián; Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna; Fabra i Coats in Barcelona; De Appel in Amsterdam; or Konsthall C in Stockholm.

Double Museum

Museo Bikoitza / Double Museum is a programme of artistic interventions in San Telmo Museum. Annually, an artist is invited to create a favourable atmosphere for re-readings of the museum’s collection and narratives of display. The result of this work will form part of the exhibition programme for a year, before finally being added to the museum’s art collection, indicative of, although not fulfilling, the need to incorporate every present moment into the heritage and story of the San Telmo collection. The guest artists this year are Iratxe Jaion & Klaas van Gorkum. The Museo Bikoitza programme deploys the logic of its successive invitations starting out from a proposal by Asier Mendizabal. Ibon Aranberri, Erlea Maneros and Jose Mari Zabala have been the previous participating artists.