At a press conference in Bilbao, an auction of the copyrights to
14 digitized Basque “Euskara” fonts was announced. It was noted that these rights are held by a private owner who digitized the well-known, widely used traditional fonts in the mid-1990s. A debate erupted in the media.

A symposium called „On City Development and Typography“, organized as part of the project, further fueled the debate, which centered on folklore, Basque identity, and the changing landscape of copyrights. The role of signage in public spaces in shaping identity became apparent, as did its influence on the broader cultural context.

When new elections for the regional parliament were unexpectedly called in the Basque Country, the politicized atmosphere began to affect the debate and the perception of the auction. In front of an interested audience, the press, and television cameras, the auctioneer called off the auction due to a lack of bidders.
The rights to the typefaces remain in private hands to this day.

The partially controlled and non-repeatable performative work was carried out over a period of three months and concluded with the creation of an archive. It has been produced by Consonni in collaboration with auctionhouse Sala Moyua, and with legal advice by Pedro Brosa Patentes y Marcas.

All relevant press articles, news reports, and TV features on the auction and the public debate have been archived and supple-
mented with materials from the symposium and subsequent articles from the art and design trade press; together, they form a corpus that reflects the cultural signs, dynamics, and historical moment of the Basque Country’s “semiotic landscape” in 2001, and after.

Views from the press conference and the auction, held at the Colegio de arquitectos Vasco-Navarro, Bilbao; selected visuals from a talk presented at the symposium, press clipping from
EL País newspaper, and news in Basque regional TV ETB 2,
all from March 2001.

In 2015, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid incorporated this archive into its collection of cultural documents. Materials from the corpus can be viewed in the museum’s research library; some of them have been displayed in exhibitions.

Screenshot of the article by Swedish sociolinguist Johan Järlehed for the anthology Ideology, Politics and Demands in Spanish Language, Literature and Film, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, as well as views from the exhibitions Latent Stare, Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, 2012, and Artelekun zehar. 1987-2002. An Exhibition about Arteleku through the Archive, Artium Museoa/Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, Vitoria/Gasteiz, 2025.