Lemoiz at 1:1 scale

The Azkuna Zentroa exhibition season has opened with the 'Escala 1:1' project, an exhibition by Ixone Sádaba that visually transports the Lemoiz nuclear power plant to the exhibition space, opening a dialogue about its memory, its legacy and its future.

The history of Lemoiz is a story of tensions, conflicts and a past that still resonates in the present. Designed during the Franco regime and definitively abandoned in 1984, the power plant never came into operation. Since then, the site has been surrounded by prohibitions and silences, while nature reclaims its space among the remains of concrete. In this context, Sádaba asks how we can look at a forbidden place, how we can understand it and represent it when its reality is denied to us. The exhibition unfolds a photographic investigation in which fragments of the power plant are projected at real size onto the walls of the room, generating an almost physical immersion effect. Thus, the images are not only visual documents, but windows into an inaccessible space, witnesses to a past full of meanings. In this process, photography becomes a means of restoring a certain presence of Lemoiz, even if only through its projected shadows.

'Escala 1:1', Ixone Sádaba

Curated by Carles Guerra , the exhibition is the result of a four-year research project in which Sádaba explored the uses of industrial and corporate photography, collecting images of the construction of the power plant and its current state. The work is not limited to the representation of the ruins, but rather reflects on the very nature of photography as a tool of documentation and as a space of memory. The impossibility of a total vision of the complex is translated into a sequence of partial images, which together attempt to reconstruct an elusive reality. One piece of the exhibition is the replica of the original 1974 viewpoint, from where the progress of the works was supervised. Now relocated at the entrance to the exhibition, this element becomes a metaphor for observation and control, but also for the need to rethink our access to these spaces. From this new vantage point, we find ourselves immersed in the paradox of contemplating what has been forbidden for decades.

In short, 'Escala 1:1' not only talks about Lemoiz, but also questions us about the power of images, the role of collective memory and the way we construct the story of the past.

'Escala 1:1', Ixone Sádaba