Irene Bengoechea
@lacasademasabajo
Irene Bengoechea, originally from Navarra, lives and works in Brussels.
She is a visual artist with a background in Interior Design, Ephemeral Architecture, and Fine Art Photography.
Her professional and academic journey has led her to merge space and image, continuously seeking to expand photography into the realm of installation.
She has participated in both group and solo exhibitions in Spain and Belgium.
My experience at Agora has been a process of openness and dialogue; a space where technical experimentation meets conceptual reflection.
The exchange with other artists and the opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of their working processes have been fundamental in broadening the perspective of my own practice. Receiving constant feedback from this community is allowing me to explore the freedom of error more deeply and to continue developing my own visual language.
My practice focuses on the exploration of memory, identity, and the passage of time, understanding the image as a living space through which memories and emotional experiences can be reinterpreted. Through analogue photography and experimental processes, I seek to recover latent stories and give them a new physical and conceptual dimension.
My approach merges photography with manual intervention; techniques such as painting with watercolour directly onto the image, manipulating Polaroid emulsions, and collage allow me to reinterpret memory and transform the original photograph into something more imaginative and introspective. These actions turn the photograph into a unique object and allow me to move the work towards installation, exploring its relationship with space beyond the conventional frame.
This exploration is also connected to an ecological awareness, through which I prioritise sustainable processes and the reuse of materials generated during research and experimentation. I embrace “error” and the remnants produced throughout the creative process as fundamental parts of the work, reclaiming the beauty of the unfinished and the constant transformation of matter.
Highlight Project
Guenduláin: arqueología sensible
This project begins with the path I walk between the village where I grew up and Guenduláin, the place where my family once lived, now abandoned, in Navarra.
This journey becomes a ritual for remembering those who are no longer here, transforming grief into a process of healing and acceptance of our own finitude as part of a natural cycle of returning to the earth.
The journey culminates at the tree where my family’s farm once stood and where the ashes of my loved ones now rest.
In the absence of a physical archive or stories documenting the place, this journey becomes an act of permanence: if I stop walking this path, nature will reclaim the village and the traces of my history will disappear completely.
Through analogue images and manual interventions, I capture the fragility of this landscape, emulating the degradation caused by the passage of time.
The project is conceived as a sensory installation in which the viewer is invited to move through this landscape, inhabiting the silence and the presence of what is no longer there.
