"Light is a key element in any representation"

The fourth exhibition presented by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain), as part of the Laboratories: Insights into the Permanent Collection initiative, is dedicated to Aitor Ortiz (Bilbao, 1971), a visual artist known for using photography as a means of studying architecture and space and who explains us the project.

What would you highlight from your work 'Light Walls'?

The main highlights are the visual instability, the limitations of photography, the transformation of a three-dimensional space in bi-dimensional and the verification a nonexistent space through visual resources, through light. Light is the generator of space, not only the cavity, as used to happen in the series Light Walls, but also as an element of construction of objects, something that happens in my latest work. Light is a key element that is present in any representation in one form or another, but there are cases in which light and shadow are elements of space, of the work and of the viewer's perceptual experience.

The Laboratories' initiative aims to encourage the dissemination and knowledge of modern and contemporary art. To what extent is there a disconnection between contemporary art and society? Do you think these initiatives will help to improve its social projection?

I think this is an interesting initiative to understand the artist's motivations when producing a work, the process of continuous development, the trial-and-error method. I think that being able to access to this information reinforces the relationship between the audience and the work. As Igor Stravinsky said "Listening to music is not enough, you have to see it".

The models featured at 'Laboratories' are designed with a didactic approach. What do you hope visitors to the exhibition will take away with them?

(I hope they get) the feeling that they have more knowledge than they had before, that they have received enough information to make them understand and enjoy more a work, a tool to put an isolated work in context for future exhibitions.

Your relationship with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao dates back to 1995, how would you describe it?

Indeed my relationship with the museum dates back to 1995 when the Museum commissioned me to photograph the construction's process of the building. It was a very important assignment for me, which would define, somehow, the subsequent evolution between my work and the architecture. I lost contact with the Museum after its opening in 1997 until 2007, when Rosa Martinez, on occasion on the Museum's tenth anniversary, selected twelve Basques artists for the exhibition Chacun à son goût. The next year, the museum acquired the work Light Walls 011 for its permanent collection and invited me, in 2010 to organize the show Laboratories.

You use photography as a way to study architecture and space. What does photography provides to this study that other visual arts do not provide?

In my work there is a constant concern between experience and representation, therefore, between the space or the building photographed, the scale and the position of the picture in the exhibition space and finally the viewer. I work in areas related to architecture but I analyze them from photography and images backgrounds. The photographs are about architecture and sometimes related to a specific architecture. The real light and the shadows they create build a new architectural space in the room. My intention was to "grow" the photographic pieces in a three-dimensional space, by introducing a real light. I project the light on the architecture of the room, which grow even and, above all, change our perception of architecture.

What other projects do you have in mind?

The German publisher Hatje Cantz has just published a monograph on my work and, from December 16 to March 4, I will expose at the Swedish Museum of Photography (Fotografiska), in Stockholm.