What is it?

GETXOPHOTO is a festival focusing on images that has been held in Getxo for 18 years. It was created and is independently organised by Begihandi. The Festival, which is thematic in nature, was conceived as a transmedia platform that hosts different proposals from visual storytellers from all over the world, aimed at creating a conversation with society on contemporary issues. In doing so, it is seeking to encourage critical thinking and provide dynamic and flexible responses to the issues that affect us. It is characterised by a radical defence of public spaces as meeting points, places of mutual recognition and as places for sharing experiences, playing and celebrating.

Consequently, most of the artistic programme is made up of open-air installations, highlighting the dialogue between images and the environment. This commitment to using unconventional exhibition formats and spaces creates an open dialogue with the public while at the same time filling their everyday lives with images.

One of the goals of GETXOPHOTO is to create a critical community based on images, by providing specific content and involving cultural agents. This in turn contributes to building new audiences. It also encourages the active involvement of the community in which it is held and social return through its local links (shopkeepers, hotel and restaurant owners, artists and enthusiasts). 

GETXOPHOTO takes an interdisciplinary and cross-cutting approach and has broadened its scope to include the internet as a space for visual culture. Consequently, it has a specific online programme with digital proposals that can only be found online. The ecological transition also guides the Festival's design and production policy so as to reduce its environmental impact as much as possible and become an even more sustainable initiative.

Getxophoto 2025: REC

First we pressed the PAUSE button, then the PLAY button, and now we’re hitting REC. The round red symbol, always so easy to find on cameras and electronic devices, takes its name from record, to save, film or register. Whether still or moving, the relationship between the image and memory is a central theme in visual studies that has captured the attention of great minds in the past such as Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag and Georges Didi-Huberman. But what remains of this relationship today in contemporary image technologies?

Our throwaway culture means that we no longer take photographs or videos to treasure moments, but to share them and forget them instantly, and we face an overwhelming abundance that wears our sensitivity down, turning all visual memory into pure noise. Added to this is the unprecedented proliferation of fake images –which collapse our concept of reality– and the conversion of any document into a file readable only by non-human intelligences, with software and devices designed to quickly become scrap metal. Furthermore, the structural limits of data centres, where we store memories without taking into account their enormous needs for water and energy, threaten the future of the “archive”, both personal and civilising (spoiler alert: it won’t be possible to keep all the information).

These are just some of the factors meaning that visual technologies are facing a gigantic paradigm shift today. That is why, in the next edition of Getxophoto, we ask ourselves how the visual media arts are reinventing themselves in this scenario: what is the difference between accumulating archives and telling a story, what is the future of images –and of memory constructed through visual registers– in a world with extreme, immaterial, easily manipulated and apparently infinite REC.