Mugak/ Biennial will feature a hundred free activities in its fourth edition

2023 October 4

• This morning the official programme of the Basque Country International Architecture Biennial was presented, which will begin this month and will run until 24 November.
• Three ephemeral pavilions, conferences, workshops, exhibitions, guided tours... The fourth edition of Mugak/ brings together proposals in the three Basque capitals around this year's slogan, 'rebuild, reinhabit, rethink'. 
• In addition to the programme promoted by the Biennial and the projects selected through the Order of subsidies, for the first time a programme of parallel events called Off Mugak/ is included, a total of twenty in all.

The International Architecture Biennial of the Basque Country Mugak/ has this morning unveiled the official programme of its fourth edition, which has the motto 'rebuild, re-build, rethink' and, under this theoretical framework, seeks to reflect on the role of architecture in the current context of multidimensional crisis. It will begin this month of October and, until 24 November, will bring together around a hundred free activities distributed between San Sebastian, Bilbao and Vitoria-Gasteiz.

The programme includes a series of activities associated with the central exhibition of this year's edition, as well as proposals subsidised through the Order launched at the beginning of the year by the Department of Territorial Planning, Housing and Transport of the Basque Government, the promoter of the event. Projects by other collaborators and free agents that have been incorporated through the new call for Off Mugak/ parallel events will also be shown.

Three ephemeral pavilions

Mugak/ 2023 will take architecture to the streets thanks to three ephemeral pavilions that will host part of the programme. The first of these will open next week, on 10 October. This is the pavilion of the TAC! Festival de Arquitectura Urbana pavilion, 'Lost Forest', which will erect a structure of trunks burnt in forest fires on the Sagüés esplanade in San Sebastian and will invite reflection on this problem. The festival will provide different activities around this pavilion. They will begin on the 10th itself, with an exhibition of the projects that were received for the Sagüés pavilion following the open call for entries launched by TAC! It will also host conferences, such as one on large forest fires, with Mónica Parrilla (Greenpeace) on the 17th at 19h.

The second pavilion will be located in Bilbao. 'Mugak/ HABIT[atu]Z' is the proposal of the Bilbao studio behark, which will use H A B I T [+], a modular transformation system for the improvement of existing residential buildings through the addition of new living spaces and exterior galleries, which generate useful, comfortable and quality spaces for homes and buildings in need of them. The system is based on the use of prefabricated modules, repetitive but at the same time diverse (versatile and adaptable) that allow a quick and light construction adapted to each circumstance. It will open on 6 November and will kick off the Bilbao programme.

Finally, the Higher Technical School of Architecture of the UPV/EHU will add the 'ARGI' pavilion, which will be located in the heart of La Concha Bay, in Alderdi Eder Park. It will open on 7 November and will host different conferences and workshops. It has been conceived as an extension of the teaching space with a singular shape and materiality, designed for itinerancy. A modular system that can be easily transported and assembled very quickly and that lends itself to a variety of future uses. An itinerant architecture made from the reuse of scenographic material from the production of a film.

Top-level conferences 

Last July saw the preview of this year's main exhibition, 'Inhabiting Change', which will bring together the works of renowned figures from the world of architecture and the arts in a collective dialogue. It will open to the public on 26 October, the day after the 'pritzker' Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, the protagonists of this exhibition, will give a master conference to inaugurate this edition of the Biennial. The event will be held at the Teatro Principal in San Sebastian and a limited number of tickets will be available to the public soon.

But they will not be the only ones: all the participants of 'Inhabiting Change' will travel to the Basque Country to give different conferences throughout Mugak/ 2023. Thus, the programme will offer appointments with Mireia Luzárraga, from the TAKK studio (Donostia, 26 October, at the Basque Institute of Architecture); Ramón Faura (27 October at the Basque Institute of Architecture); José María Torres Nadal (Donostia, 28 October, with a workshop at the 'Lost Forest' pavilion, and at the Artium museum in Vitoria on 31 October); Marina Otero, recently appointed architecture and design advisor to the Reina Sofía Museum (Vitoria, Artium Museoa, 31 October); Cristina Acha, of Acha Zaballa Arquitectos (Bilbao, 8 November); and the studio amid.cero9 studio and the researcher Beatriz Colomina (both in Bilbao, 22 November, at Azkuna Zentroa).

A wide-ranging programme until 24 November

Different entities were selected through the line of aid that the Department of Territorial Planning, Housing and Transport of the Basque Government launched at the beginning of the year to provide the programme with a wide range of proposals for all audiences. This morning, the activities in which they will be materialised were specified.

They will kick off with 'Periferiak: peripheral and ephemeral', the proposal of the Gipuzkoa delegation of the Official Basque-Navarrese Association of Architects, in collaboration with AHIKU-Arkitektura eta hiri kultura. It brings together a series of activities designed and coordinated by artists and architecture professionals, which will be built collectively by its participants. These are thematic and participative walks and workshops in a singular, peripheral and borderline urban space such as La Herrera - Trintxerpe, in Pasaia: archaeological walk 'Let's read what the walls say' (21 October), textile graffiti workshop 'Signs and peripheral signs. Capture the city' (22 October), urban and architectural walk 'Passages and landscapes. De lo industrial a lo urbano' (28 October), 'Peripoetic walk', a poetic and performative walk (29 October) and the photographic rally 'Historia Material de la Ciudad' (12 November). These activities will culminate with an intervention by the plastic artist Maider López on Saturday 18 November, the result of all the previous activities.

The offer for children is back with Maushaus, which has organised the workshops 'REMAKE!'. They will be held on 28 October, 4 and 11 November and will be independent, and through them the three key concepts of this edition, 'rebuild', 're-inhabit' and 'rethink', will be brought closer to the children's public through philosophical thinking by means of different interactive game dynamics. They will be aimed at children from 6 to 12 years old and will take place at the Basque Institute of Architecture. Maushaus will also be offering workshops for young people at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, with three workshops on the exhibition 'Gego. Measuring Infinity' on 3, 10 and 17 November.

'Rhizoma' is the project by architects Victoria Collar and Jon Garbizu (Garbizu Collar Architects), Gonzalo Peña (KRI Studio) and Diego Sologuren, in collaboration with the company Egoin Wood Group and Chillida Leku. This essay on the demystification of the baserri and the romanticisation of the rural world will seek to bring this historical structure out of anachronism in order to redefine and adapt its genealogy to new ways of inhabiting the rural environment. It will divide its proposal into four acts, all at Chillida Leku: HAS- (begin), with a conference and the setting up of its Arte-Fakto on 3 November and an original musical performance by the Argentinean-Japanese duo Lolo & Sosaku on 4 November; SOR- (create), with a conference on 10 November and a workshop on 11 November; BER- (remake), with another conference on 17 November; and a final conference BIZ- (inhabit) on 18 November. Rhizoma will close with a round table to gather the conclusions of its activities on 21 November.

Another project will analyse how, at the beginning of the 2000s, when bumping detonated the disco phenomenon in the Basque Country, music jumped to the social, fashion, leisure, relationships and also to space. Temples, tours and routes received groups of young people every weekend. Venice, Txitxarro, Jazzberri, Itzela... The coast of Gipuzkoa was witness to this. BeAr Architects proposes 'disco-TEKAK: temples of bumping on the coast of Gipuzkoa', an approach to this social phenomenon in order to understand its context and implications. It will take the form of guided bus tours of some of these temples and three conferences on 15, 16 and 17 November.

The Peña Ganchegui Awards will be back for another year. Organised by the Peña Ganchegui Archive with the support of the Department of Territorial Planning, Housing and Transport, the award ceremony will be held on 20 October at the Basque Institute of Architecture, and on 2 November an exhibition of the prize-winning works will be inaugurated and there will be a talk by the winner in the afternoon.

The programme in Bilbao will begin with the inauguration of the 'Mugak/ HABIT[atu]Z' pavilion on 6 November. Much of it is the result of the project 'The estuary as a strategic axis to rebuild, re-inhabit and rethink the metropolitan urban space', by the Association for the Revitalisation of Metropolitan Bilbao, Bilbao Metropoli-30. There will be a variety of proposals: a virtual visit 'Past, present and future of La Ría', which will open on the 7th November at 11am in Itsasmuseum; later, at 11:30am, a visit to the artistic installation 'Piel de Luz' in the same place; the opening of the exhibition 'La ciudad inmóvil: Oteiza in Zorrozaurre', on the 8th November at 19h at the COAVN Bizkaia headquarters; 10th November, 19h, opening of the exhibition 'KATEBEGI / LINK / ESLABÓN' at La Terminal; and workshop on 'Reuse of riverside structures in the Bilbao Estuary' on the 14th November at IED Kunsthal, from 8:30 to 19h.

Bilbao will also host the 'Rehabitar lo doméstico' sessions on 8 November, with a varied programme starting at 11am. The guide 'Loft Study Houses' will be presented, a project to convert commercial premises into habitable dwellings; it will be followed by a presentation by Surbisa on innovative programmes in integral regeneration; this will be followed by the conference 'The street and the house, a receptive binomial' by Cristina Acha, from Acha Zaballa Arquitectos, the studio responsible for 'Loft Study Houses'; and will conclude with the presentation of 'Repensar para rehabitar lo doméstico' (Rethinking to re-inhabit the domestic), by Halo Arkitektura. This project raises the issue that houses all over the world are becoming more and more similar. Even more so now, in times of ecological and social crisis, when "inhabiting" as a socio-cultural stance is key. For this reason, it will invite the inhabitants of the domestic to reflect on the most basic inhabiting, on our dwellings, through this informative guide for reflection (which will be available at different points throughout the Biennial) and an Instagram profile as a tool to collect the reflections and conclusions of the participating public.

The second publication of this edition, 'Trazas de ronda', by architects Jaime Gutiérrez Armendariz, Andrea Aguilera Ruiz and Itziar Molinero Miranda, will be presented in a workshop on 10 November. It is born of an investigation that began in 2019, when a family building located in the Old Quarter of Bilbao was put up for sale due to disuse and its situation of near collapse. Starting from that basis, the graphic document aims to rescue all the forgotten memory that still remains, dealing with issues such as collecting, traceability, superimposition, nostalgia, etc., and vindicating the complexity of domestic spaces. It uses forensic architecture to rescue the life that inhabited it.

New Off Mugak/ programme

The 'side events' are one of the new features of this year's edition. Some twenty of them make up the Off Mugak/ programme of side events, the result of a call that for the first time invited national and international agents to add their activities to Mugak/. With an open vocation and the aim of adding more voices to the reflection on this year's theme, for the first time it was open to individuals and entities from outside the Basque Country.

They will begin on 17 October with the presentation of Fabrika, the High Performance Centre for the Cultural Transformation of Companies. On 20 November Baskegur will present the Wood Week together with Ademan, in the 'Lost Forest' pavilion. On the 26th, before the conference by Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK), the documentary 'Hau Etxea Bada', by Nuria Casal, will be screened at the Basque Institute of Architecture. On the 27th, before Ramón Faura's talk, there will be a talk on 'Canteras Monte Igeldo' by Oscar Cruz García at the same venue. The 'Architectures of Care' conferences will come to Vitoria-Gasteiz on the 30th and 31st, organised by IDarte. On 3 November, Ascongi will offer a conference on the construction sector at the Basque Institute of Architecture. The artist Koldobika Jauregui will create an ephemeral graphic on the exterior of 'Lost forest' using lime, various pigments and fire on 5 November, organised by AHIKU Elkartea. On 7 November, the conference 'Heritage: constructs and perceptions' will take place at the Basque Country Architecture Institute. On 9 November, at IED Kunsthal, the exhibition talk 'Re-thinking the city through landscape design' will be held. Museum Cemento Rezola will open its exhibition '3D Printing' on 16 November. On 19 November there will be a guided tour of the Bloom pieces in Cristina Enea Park, organised by Moduz. On 21 November, the conference 'REdoing: Industrialisation in rehabilitation: how to apply new technologies to 'remake' the building stock' will be held in Bizkaia Aretoa, organised by the COAAT of the three Basque provinces. On 23 November, the Mexican architect Luis Manuel Ochoa Sosa will organise 'The RE prefix in the periphery of Guadalajara (Mexico)' in the 'Mugak/ Habitatuz' pavilion. Finally, on the same day, 'Guiris', a conference with students from the TEC of Monterrey.

Mugak/ 2023 will come to an end on 24 November, with an event at the Institute of Architecture, details of which will be announced shortly.