LIMINA: COSMOPOLITAN CHICKEN PROJECT 30, CHILLIDA LEKU, Hernani (ES) 17 October - 20 December 2025

This fall Chillida Leku opens its gates to a remarkable exhibition by Koen Vanmechelen: Limina – Cosmopolitan Chicken Project 30. This thirtieth edition of Vanmechelens crossbreeding project marks a new threshold in an artistic journey that has spanned more than three decades.

A Chicken that crossed the world

The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP) is Vanmechelen’s most iconic work. Since 1999, he has been crossbreeding chickens from different countries and cultures as a living symbol of diversity, hybridity, and interconnectedness.

What began with a single bird has grown into a global artistic ecosystem — weaving together biology, migration, identity, and ethics.

Between stone, wind and silence

Chillida Leku is a singular open-air museum situated at the foot of the Basque mountains. It is the life’s work of Eduardo Chillida (1924–2002), one of the major sculptors of the twentieth century. Working with steel, stone and concrete, Chillidae xplored space itself as a material — in conversation with gravity, silence, and light.

Chillida Leku – literally Chillida’s place - is a sculptural landscape, blending natural elements, architecture, and monumental art.

Chillida's presence 

Chillida shares affinities with artists like Henry Moore and Donald Judd, and engaged in philosophical dialogue with Martin Heidegger about the nature of space and being. His art is both existential and rooted: He conceived the universal through the lens of the local, much like Vanmechelen does.

Visitors to Chillida Leku move among forms that don’t dominate but invite. For Vanmechelen to intervene in this landscape is rare — a meaningful encounter between two artists who each explore the limits of form, identity, and relation.

What lives while we sleep

As a prelude to the exhibition, biodiversity researcher Bart Van Camp will stage a nocturnal intervention at the museum on July 25.

Titled Instead of Sleeping, the project unfolds just before sunrise using a custom-built moth lamp to attract and monitor night butterflies. Developed from earlier collaborations with Vanmechelen at LABIOMISTA, this work fuses scientific observation with poetic reverence.

Set against the backdrop of the Basque mountains, this quiet act becomes almost sacred: an encounter between art, nature, and the invisible life that unfolds while we sleep.

Limina opens a living dialogue between art, science, landscape, and speculative futures.

This thirtieth edition of CCP invites us not just to look, but to live differently — with the unknown, the unimaginable, and the other.

 Exhibition Facts

The expo is part of the Mugak Basque Country International Architecture Biennial Curated by Jon Garbizu and Victoria Collar of Garbizu Collar Architecture, together with Gonzalo Peña Sancho from Kri Arquitectura

more info

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