Zigor

Kepa Akixo aka Zigor, is a sculptor, photographer, artist and poet. He was born in 1947 in Aretxabaleta, (a town in the province of Gipuzkoa), in the Southern Basque Country. His poems were published commencing 1973, and he travelled the world as a photojournalist for major news magazines and the Capa press agency until 1982. Then, in 1983, he decided to give full rein to his creativity through sculpture and rapidly joined the ranks of great contemporary Basque sculptors. Zigor draws inspiration from nature, giving new form to its original movement of organized chaos. Sculptures, photographs, paintings and poems reverberate together and convey the archaic, ubiquitous strength of a world and humanity bound together by their roots. Kepa Akixo was born in 1947 and grew up in a small mountain village in the province of Guipuzcoa, in the Southern Basque Country. Somewhat of a tearaway child and a recalcitrant student, at the age of eleven he joined the Catholic seminary boarding school in Saturraran where he discovered the ocean and biblical texts. Encountering the metaphysics and profundity of both the sea and sacred writings was a decisive factor in Zigor's development as an autodidact. At the age of 14, he worked as a fitter and turner, and excelled in the sport of Basque pelota. Reflexes conditioned as a labourer and pelotari were to have a significant impact on his artistic kinesics to come, with repeated momentum from the wall to the work. For several years, from the age of 16, Kepa Akixo became fully committed to political activism in the midst of the Franco dictatorship. In addition to spiritual texts, he wrote of resistance striving for a free Basque Country, both its entity and its language. It was during this period that he adopted his nom de plume Zigor, the Basque word for "whip", and laid bare the roots of organic poetry in which fragility is revealed at its most robust, whether in nature, form or humankind.