Year: 2021
Location: La Concha beach. San Sebastián. SPAIN
Design: Sebastián Arquitectos. Sergio Sebastián
Promoter: Fomento Ayuntamiento de San Sebastián
Collaborators: Alejandro Alda, Laura Martínez, Tecnoradio, ABS Fluge, Estudio Habito (Geziak)
Photos: Sebastián Arquitectos y Pablo Cifuentes
How to present and rethink the image of a city, its most defined and clear symbol.
Kontxa is proposed from the terms of the ephemeral, of the construction of an event that, within the licenses that gives us its completely reversible and instantaneous character, adorns and views for the occasion the already beautiful delivery of the sea to the city of San Sebastián in its famous natural dock, called La Concha (the shell).
Historically, the relationship between art and nature has produced different types of conversation depending on the degree of intervention developed, bringing us suggestive, abrupt, violent, kind, enriching, or surprising dialogues.
Artificial light thus becomes the most powerful tool to paint the radios that redraw this gigantic shell in the San Sebastián night. However, the tremendous visual impact of this urban mural is instantly blurred as if nothing had ever happened. This is the illusion of light, the magic of event.
It is an ephemeral landart work made with light and sound that draws what everyone knows is there but no one has traced, a beautiful shell in one of the most privileged places in our geography. San Sebastián as a great urban theater, as the largest stage we can imagine.
Kontxa operates on the boundary between sea and land, between nature and the city, between the environment of a wild and domesticated sea. We wanted that from this condition of limit also operate between tradition and contemporaneity, and for this the light interacts with the sound in a series of pieces such as Geziak (arrows) where the sounds of the traditional instruments as txalapartas and albokas dialogue and dance with the beams of light that bathe the city and the beach and play with the waves, making all the resonances of the bay resonate in unison.
Kontxa is an installation made for Christmas 2021 and tested in the summer of 2020 with long-range laser projectors that sweep the distance of 1.200 m between the Island of Santa Clara and the beach of La Concha. The City Council of San Sebastian has wanted to add in the bay a piece of ephemeral art to the already existing references of Chillida, Oteiza, and the recent work of Cristina Iglesias on the island itself.
It is a dynamic installation, accompanied by an audiovisual show of territorial dimension, which covers the entire bay and allows different perceptions either from the beach, the promenade and the Igeldo and Urgull mountains. In the distance from the high points of the city the work is perceived as a large shell. But it is from the plane of the water and from the beach, where the rays acquire their own and extraordinary dimension.
Born from a large lighthouse they display a whole visual repertoire of dynamic effects of the light itself in its play with the atmospheric conditions of the beach, with the mist, the steam, the movement of the waves and the sand.
The various suspended moisture filters generate dynamic shadows, vaporous clouds of color, and the diffraction of light in a chromatic prism, bathing the sand and ramming like a multicolored rainbow against the wall of the historic promenade.