Artist Statement
There is a gap between the Galician I speak and the one I have heard at home. It emerged when I decided to use that language instead of Spanish, in a context of linguistic diglossia. There was a forced distance that made me relate to my own tongue from a position that constantly denaturalized it. I am not just a Galician speaker; I had to learn, I had to make the decision of using a subaltern language.
In that process, I discovered that a minoritized culture survives even if it is unseen. It resists through gestures, articulations, and fragments that are transmitted fluidly in the periphery. There they can be grasped to understand a feeling of belonging that, despite being persecuted and then distorted by the Spanish state, never disappeared. The tongue did not die, whether my friends and I spoke it or not.
So I tried to reduce that forced distance. I wanted to reclaim a bond with what I thought was Galician. Through my practice I resorted to collective constructions that preceded me, that are a part of my village itself, as if they were a rock or a fountain. Popular songs, traditions, or objects in the landscape. But I found another gap there, between these Galician expressions and the representations I had at hand to approach them. A space that could be in the memory of hearing someone I love using words I didn’t understand, or in the effort of speaking in Galician with whom I used to speak to in Spanish.
Where I expected to have something fixed to lean on—a cultural identity to repeat—I found something contingent that is being broken and rebuilt; that more than an image is an event. I saw my own position exposed by this discovery and, assuming this vulnerability, I thought: What if I look into the gap?
The tools, the actions and the contradictions I am finding in there are the base of my work. Sometimes they solidify through using 3D, sculptural and sound installations, photography or performance, but its core always comes from within the tension of that gap.
Breogán Xague 