"Being born in the Basque Country at the end of the 1990s and living abroad for ten years has forced me to confront questions about cultural identity throughout my life. It is perhaps from here, from where my fascination with the object and symbol of the flag is born, as a codified element, as a language", says Diego Vivanco as part of a reflection linked to his migrant status.
If it moves, it's alive, is the title of the project that, as part of Bitamine Faktoria EAS-EZE's Basque art internationalization program, Vivanco chose. The flags communicate it to us, they are protagonists, however their reading is neither obvious nor direct -unless we are familiar with the message transmission code of navigation.
A set of flags "indicates" the site of the exhibition inside the Immigrants Hotel, a space where thousands of people in transit, migrants, exiles, expatriates, travellers since 1911 passed through and who are still carrying out, in some of their premises, their settlement procedures living together with the Immigration Museum and the UNTREF Contemporary Art Centre for Cultural Diversity.
Immigrants' Hotel, border site, border between real and imaginary worlds, between the unfulfilled projects in the country of origin and the hopes before the vast horizon to be discovered. Vivanco's work - his flags, videos and photographs - is resignified in this space to expand its senses: it is not a "white cube" but a building loaded with memory that embodies in its own history what it shelters. That is why we usually say that the works installed here become a "specific place".
Thus, from the coded flags chosen by the artist to encrypt his messages to the photo performance in which his body is in itself a flag, the artist's experience is presented to the spectator as an invitation to make another experience, that of deciphering his keys, in short that of thought.