Eduardo Chillida rests in the shadow of a magnolia tree that looks to the sky next to the Zabalaga hamlet. On one side of his grave, the woman of his life, Pilar Belzunce. On the other, Joaquín Goikoetxea, the gardener who took care of the Chillida-Leku, a magical open-air sculpture museum in which the artist dedicated fifteen years of his life so that the public could interact with his work in the green meadows of Hernani, surrounded by beech, oak and poplar trees. “What belongs to one is almost nobody's,” thought Chillida, one of the greatest figures of sculpture of the 20th century, who would have turned one hundred years old today. His work remains alive in the present, but the absence of his figure - 24 years have passed since his death - has blurred the poet and philosopher capable of transforming the deepest thoughts into the simplest forms.
“And that dimension of his, that of the thinker, that of the man with his own vision of the world, which is almost like an ode to humanity, is what we would like to bring back to the world today, to our lives, that would permeate the generations that could not know him. You take Aitona's writings and they are like a guide to be able to live in a time as turbulent as this, it shows us the commitment that we should have with ourselves and with others to be able to generate fantastic spaces for coexistence," says his grandson. Mikel Chillida, development director of Chillida Leku, the epicenter from which the deployment of activities begins throughout the year with which the centenary will be celebrated in different places around the world.
Mikel Chillida refers to the new edition of the Writings recently published by La Fábrica (see box on the next page), which compiles the reflections that Chillida (San Sebastián, 1924-2002) left in a disorderly manner in notebooks, fragments of paper or in the margins of his drawings. “It is very easy to be stunned by the Comb of the Wind in San Sebastián, watching the three pieces of Corten steel and the waves breaking on the rock. And the same thing happens when you see Praise of the Horizon in Gijón or the Monument to Tolerance in Seville. But when you dig a little bit and understand what is behind the aesthetics of the place, you suddenly realize the true dimension of the artist.”
Because more than a sculptor, Chillida was a creator of places. He was especially interested in public works, because it was the way to "multiply its owners" - again, "what belongs to one is almost nobody's" - but also because it is in common spaces where "sculpture becomes a mediator between us, human beings, and the question,” argues his grandson. “The Wind Comb is complete when we arrive. It is a limit, a threshold that exists between that powerful nature, that ungovernable sea and us. When you get closer, the ground transforms and you go from a perfectly smooth sidewalk to an uncomfortable pavement that almost gives you a sprain because you have left your comfort zone and enter a space that belongs neither to nature nor to humans, but that in a way it belongs to both, and is full of questions.”
Today the sculpture complex built in 1977 is one of the emblems of the city, which cannot conceive itself without it, but the controversies it aroused at the time delayed its inauguration for thirty years. “It was not an easy project, not even a joke. Today it wouldn't be either. When someone wants to cross that limit, that threshold, and do something that really hasn't been done and that is almost difficult to understand... But art is going towards the unknown and he never stopped in the face of adversity or took any shortcuts," says his grandson.
Before becoming an artist, Chillida had another life as the starting goalkeeper for Real Sociedad, who was nicknamed El Gato for his ability to jump on the ball. He debuted at the age of 19 and that same season he had to hang up his boots as a result of a brutal tackle from an opponent that broke his knee. “That pissed him off a lot because his vocation, his dream, his life was to be a goalkeeper. And, of course, the injury leaves him in dry dock, he liked sports, he was a rower, a pelota player... but for him things happen because they happen and you have to follow their scent until you get to where you have to go," says Mikel, who remembers him as a “enjoyable” grandfather, especially in the areas in which he really enjoyed, work and family (he had eight children and 27 grandchildren).
And he adds that for him “the qualities of a good goalkeeper and a good sculptor were the same: the management of time and space. He said that the area with the goal creates a dihedral and that dihedral is the only three-dimensional space on the soccer field. And the goalkeeper is the only figure who is continually seeing everything, measuring that intersection between space and time, which is the ball. And he has to be attentive to measure it, manage it and in the end be able to anticipate it. As a sculptor he did exactly the same.”
He jumped into the void and wanted to become an architect, a career he abandoned shortly after to join the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. But he was so good at drawing that he got bored. 'In his daughter Susana's book of conversations, In Praise of the Horizon, he himself recounted that boredom: “He drew very easily and very quickly. He made three drawings of nude poses at a time when the others couldn't finish even one. Everyone came up to me, and I, being a kid, was quite happy. Not even half a month had passed when (...) I said to myself: 'This can't be art, it's too easy.' An idea occurred to me, instead of drawing with my right hand, do it with my left. Thus, my head and my sensitivity or my emotion could go ahead of my hand. The hand would do what I told it, but more slowly, following what I ordered, obeying.”
“What I already know does not make sense”, one of his favorite aphorisms, led him to discover iron after a stay in Paris and to work with it “intuitively” until he created a dazzling personal universe (he also worked with wood, concrete , ceramics...) composed of works that today speak of tolerance, freedom or respect for nature in the urban landscape of cities such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Dallas or Washington. Coinciding with the birthday, the Chillida Leku (Chillida's place) hosts the fabulous exhibition Universo Maeght, a tribute to the dealer who projected him to the world and which brings together some of those who were his great friends: Calder, Miró, Braque, Léger, Giacometti... It is the starting shot of a program that throughout the year will feature exhibitions at the Balenciaga Museum in Getaria, the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid, the Hauser gallery
The architect of the void, as he called himself, left without seeing his last utopia realized: creating a space inside the Tindaya mountain in Fuerteventura “that could be offered to men of all races and colors, a great sculpture.” for tolerance.” “It was a gift to the Canary Islands, to humanity, but neither the work nor what he was trying to do was understood, and that did hurt him a lot,” admits the sculptor's grandson, who never wavered in his commitment to tolerance.”In the seventies and eighties, fresh out of the dictatorship, with a very turbulent Basque society, he believed in the human being, in dialogue, in coexistence... His position was neither extreme nor in another and that made him a suspect for almost everyone,” he remembers.
But before the degenerative disease he suffered crippled him, he fulfilled one last dream: he designed the place where he wanted to rest, under the great magnolia tree of Zabalaga, next to a steel cross that he worked in the forge secretly from his wife, who always accompanied him. “He was gone for a couple of days and was very suspicious...he didn't want her to find out about her, probably because he wanted to surprise her, although I don't know what her word is. He created a place for them, for the moment when one of them was missing. In the end, he was the first.”
