Seguimiento de una noticia (Following a Piece of News)

In the 1970s, Concha Jerez applied tools from conceptual art to Spain’s political situation during the transition to democracy, paying particular attention to the continuation of censorship, the lack of freedom of speech and state violence. Seguimiento de una noticia (Following a Piece of News) is based on a documented event: the death at police hands of five workmen during a workers’ demonstration in Vitoria. The artist gathers news stories relating to the event, taken from the front pages of the newspaper El País between the 5^th and the 23^rd of May 1977, photocopied onto A4 sheets. In the photocopies, all the other stories were systematically blocked out, so that a single glance clearly shows how the coverage of the event gradually decreases. The work started off as an artist’s book, and was later presented as a vitrine installation. The artist uses Seguimiento de una noticia to denounce the way all journalistic trace of a state crime disappears, so it becomes a commentary on the (in)visibility of a conflict according to its coverage in the media. And Concha Jerez becomes a fixture in the progressive politicisation of Spanish art in the 1970s.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio