New Basque pelota court to be opened in Philippines

The team will be made up of 34 Basque pelota players and will be called Sport Valey Jai Alai. It will be open on May 1st.

Photo. www.euskalkultura.com

Basque company Meridian Corporation, presided by Aitor Totoricagüena Arana, Pedro Totoricagüena Arana and Mikel Plaza, will open a new court for Basque pelota on May 1st in the Philippines called Sport Valey Jai-Alai and will be situated at Santa Ana Cagayan Valley, in the Northeast of the island.

The enclosure will be located fifty meters far from the beach, next to a superb resort, and the team will be made up of 34 Basque pelota players, ten of them Basque. The complex will be able to hold up to four thousand people and the court will be nearly of 52 meters.

Aitor Totoricagüena is very glad about the development of the events because after so many years of work and uncertainty, his dream is about to come true.

In this sense he pointed out the great importance of opening this pelota court in a time when many pelota courts have been closed, and in a place considered as Special Economic Zone and Freeport in constant growth.

Two Basque French restaurants enter list of establishments awarded Michelin stars

The famous culinary guide's list of top 100 favours the Basque country, though with some reticence from the resident chefs.

Auberge Basque Iparralde: Photo: EFE

The Michelin Guide, the prestigious guide to exceptional restaurants, has published its 100th edition on restaurants in France. The new list of top restaurants was read by François Mespléde, director of the guides, in Le Bristol restaurant ran by Eric Fréchon.

Surprisingly, the chef of one of the list's newest additions, the Auberge Basque in Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle, was somewhat less than delighted with the decision to award them one Michelin star, as he felt it conflicted with his vision for the restaurant. Cédric Béchade's aim is to serve good, reasonably-priced food to a local market in an informal environment. Other newcomer, Les Rosier in Biarritz, shares a similar outlook. Both chefs have expressed an intention to continue in the same vane and avoid becoming elitist establishments.

There are various restaurants in Ipar Euskal Herria (northern Basque country) with one Michelin star and just one which has two: Fermin Arrambide's hotel-restaurant Les Pyrénées in St Jean Pied de Port. The number of restaurants with 3 stars remains at 26, with just one new entry in this section: Le Bristol restaurant, better known as "Sarcozy´s canteen", given the regularity with which the French president frequents it, and which played host to this year's unveiling.

Director of the guides, François Mespléde, declared this year's list to be a reflection of the latest tendency in French culinary trends: small establishments which favour local products.

Exhibition at Guggenheim Museum:Video as an art form

Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections analyzes the audiovisual medium through seven essential works to understand this expressive form of contemporary art.

I-Be Area. Photo: Guggenheim Museum

Following the 2008 exhibition Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections, this presentation investigates the ways in which contemporary artists have used video to create sites of immersion and discovery.

The seven works in the exhibition have been acquired by the Guggenheim during the past five years, attesting to the museum's ongoing commitment to this vital field of contemporary art, all works. The exhibition will be opened until January 10th, 2010.

From its first uses in the late 1960s, video has played an important role in artists' explorations of self and society, providing a unique means of harnessing real time and space that has become increasingly sophisticated as technologies have advanced over the decades.

These installations offer a glimpse of the diverse range of themes and styles that occupy artists working with video today. In Zidane, a 21st century portrait (2006), Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno create a cinematic portrayal of soccer player Zinedine Zidane in real time over the course of a single match.

Slater Bradley's The Doppelganger Trilogy (2001-04) also focuses on icons of popular culture, conjuring the ghostly presence of musicians Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, and Michael Jackson through the distancing lens of desire and memory.

Ryan Trecartin's feature-length video I-Be Area (2007) offers an entirely different take on the role of media icons in contemporary culture, looking to the internet, where new identities and communities can be constructed virtually, propelling even the most common of us into a self-made spotlight.

Mika Rottenberg, too, invents a sort of virtual reality in Dough (2006), creating an absurdist assembly line in which a cast of characters -including a woman grotesquely overweight and another who is eerily thin- mold and package raw dough. The function of fantasy that is implicitly referenced in Trecartin's and Rottenberg's works is brought to the fore in Cao Fei's video Whose Utopia (2006). This semi-documentary plumbs the realities of daily life at a massive Chinese light bulb factory, portraying the grinding monotony of its machinelike labor while also giving voice to the fantasies of its workers, who dance and play music amidst the factory spaces as if in a dream.

Isaac Julien's Paradise Omeros (2002) extends this dreamlike ambience, employing a richly imagined, elliptical narrative to explore the social, political, and emotional terrain of postcolonialism. Finally, in Link (1995-2000), Mariko Mori transports the audience to a space of contemplation through a 360-degree, four-channel video projection that documents a series of performances in major cities and archeological sites around the world. In each location, the artist lies dormant in her signature "body capsule." These acts, when witnessed together in the installation, unify the various sites across boundaries of time and place, aiming to create a transcendent, utopian space.

Bilbao Fine Arts Museum holds "Novecento and Avant-Garde"

Bilbao Fine Arts Museum presents The "Novecento and the Early Avant-garde" exhibition until May 24th.

The "Novecento and the Early Avant-garde" now presents 149 works from the early 20th-century, in a selection of paintings, sculptures, exhibition posters and photographs by professor Eugenio Carmona.

The "Novecento and the Early Avant-garde" now presents 149 works from the early 20t--century, in a selection of paintings, sculptures, exhibition posters and photographs by professor Eugenio Carmona.

The early decades of the last century were crucial to developments in contemporary Spanish art, which is so well represented in the Museum collection.

At the beginning of the century, the idea of the modern covered a broad spectrum of sensibilities, ranging from what was known as novecentismo (the novecento, i.e. the nineteen hundreds), which sought to create a refined art, almost classical in its restraint, to the avant-garde, most often identified with Cubism and Futurism.

At the same time, the legacy of Symbolism and Impressionism continued to influence artists. In this context, a number of Basque artists tried to redefine the sense of local identity and the vernacular.

Joaquin Torres Garcia, Joaquim Sunyer, Aurelio Arteta, Daniel Vazquez Diaz, Julian de Tellaeche, Antonio de Guezala, Celso Lagar, Gabriel Garcia Maroto and Jose Maria de Ucelay are some of the leading artists represented here.