Irrintzi

Irrintzi (2007) is an action documented in video that the artist made without an audience in spaces in the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. An irrintzi is a traditional Basque shout that originated in the need for natural communication between the valleys in the region. It has survived today as a way of expressing joy and even political vindications in collective celebrations. The irrintzi is a cry that does not articulate concrete words and becomes a sign that functions as a manifesto and call to identity, or even a "war cry". "The cry becomes a basic syntactical system at the limits of language," says the artist. There are similar phenomena in other places of the world, although meaning varies according to cultural context.