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Last weekend the community center, The Hive, of the London neighborhood of Dalston was converted into a meeting place for art fans and members of the Basque community who toured the halls to enjoy BaskFest first hand.  The event provided art, drawings, dance, music and much more in a personal and approachable way. 

London, UK. The art festival BaskFest 2016 featured work by Basque artists residing in London last weekend, thanks to the London Basque Diaspora with the support of Donostia 2016.  The event took place in the Dalston neighborhood, one of the creative epicenters in the city and gathers an audience that was interested in art, as well as Basque culture.

The weekend’s events include performances of live drawing and contemporary dance exhibitions, DJs and concerts, as well as original artistic gastronomic offerings.  For example, photographer, Juanan Eguiguren cooked cow cheeks live for six hours, following his mother’s recipe, and was recorded doing so.  After the preparation, the audience was invited to try the dish, in that reinventing it from art to part of the performance.

Arzak’s restaurant, Ametsa that has a Michelin Star and is also located in London, created a pintxo in honor of the festival that it served along with more than 100 liters of txakoli “K5” by Karlos Argiñano. 

Besides the food, the festival’s format allowed the audience to interact with the artists and become part of their creations.  For example, creators, Arantxa Echarte and Isa Suarez, festival organizers, performed combining drawing, dance and music with nods to Basque and sounds like the sound of the ocean, while they created mandalas (meditation drawings originally from Tibet) live.

Another performance was by dancers Igor and Moreno, who surprised the audience with "Idiot-Sincrasy," an original performance where the dancers even dared to take a sip of Patxaran that was spontaneously offered to them, without missing a step.

The txalaparta was also featured at the festival with an exhibit by txapalartaris Felipe Ugarte and Juan Ignacio Otegi and showing of the documentary Nomadak by Raul de la Fuente who follows members of Oreka TX in a video around the world where they build txapalartas and play with local musicians in places as far apart as India, Lapland, Mongolia, Algeria or the Sahara.