Trained as a visual artist, he has been developing his artistic activity since 2001 in the field of visual arts, film and the living arts. His proposals resist the processes of acculturation and accommodation that the creative act undergoes today and seek physical – and psychic – spaces outside the institutional codifications in use.
In 2009 he produced the trilogy Oficios Preventivos (Preventive Trades), which won him the national prize (INJUVE) in the category of video art from the Spanish Ministry of Culture. This circumstance allowed him to meet the film director Oliver Laxe. Shortly afterwards, the two began a close professional relationship that resulted in the making of the experimental short film Paris#1. Later, Vicente Vázquez would collaborate in the following feature films by Laxe: Todos vós sodes capitáns and Mimosas. Both films received international critical acclaim and won awards at the Cannes International Film Festival in France.
In those years Vázquez made the films Canedo, El enemigo, 90º. Doble vertiente, Tono de escape and Goitik behera behetik Gora, awarded by the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival and screened at the Anthology Film Archive in New York, Las Palmas International Film Festival, BAFICI. Festival Internacional de Mar de Plata, Reina Sofía or Cineteca Madrid. Films that, to this day, film critics recognise as productions directly linked to the beginnings of the so-called New Galician Cinema.
From then until now, his videographic practice has developed between the sphere of the film industry and the field of video art, non-fiction documentaries, ethnography, visual anthropology and even video clips. These apparently disparate fields allow him to establish an encounter between the most orthodox practices and other activities that are alien to any kind of doctrine. A modus operandi that looks at the crossovers between technique and ethnicity in an attempt to dismantle – or at least question – the nature-culture binomial. His work, therefore, raises more questions than it answers.
A work in continuous approximation in which the existing conventions in art, the very nature of the artist, the reason for its functioning as well as the questioning of the condition of the author as a producer of cultural objects are always present. For this reason, over the years the director has worked under different names: John Mouth, Juan de Pareja y esclavo de Velázquez, Zumo Natural, ESTADOSUNIDOS, QQ, Vázquez/Arrieta.
In 2013, together with the artists Usue Arrieta, Marc Vives and Ainara Elgoibar, he decided to set up Tractora Coop, an artists’ cooperative based in Bizkaia that was set up to support the artistic projects of its members, as well as the projects of third parties with whom the members of the cooperative share interests, affections and concerns.
Vázquez has collaborated in numerous films in which he has played different roles. In 2015, he worked as an editor on Irati Gorostidi’s documentary Pasaia Bitartean. Film screened at the Seville European Film Festival, at the Anthology Film Library in New York and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. He has recently collaborated in several of the films of the filmmaker and artist Gerard Ortin as co-writer, assistant editor or even taking on the role of co-producer. These films have won awards and special mentions at various international festivals such as the Berlinale Shorts Competition, International Festival Cinema du Réel, Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2023 – 18 Mostra Internazionale di Architettura or Punto de Vista International Festival of Navarra, among others. He has also collaborated as editor and narrative advisor on the short films by visual anthropologist Maddi Barber Gorria and Alas/Tierra, both of which were programmed and awarded at the Documenta Madrid 2020 Festival, Curtocircuito Festival (Santiago de Compostela), Murcia Film Festival (IBAFF), Zinebi (Bilbao), L’Alternativa, International Documentary Film Festival FIDBA, Aula Xcentric, CCCB Barcelona and Filmoteca de Catalunya.
Other filmmakers with whom he has collaborated in recent years are: Ione Atenea, in the film Los caballos mueren al amanecer, and in the short film Tengan cuidado ahí fuera by the Ferrol director Alberto Gracia.
In the field of plastic arts, his works have been exhibited in public and private, national and international institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Fundación Joan Miró (Barcelona), Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Goethe Institute, Wyoming Building (New York), Bergen Assembly (Norway), CGAC, Galician Centre of Contemporary Art (Santiago de Compostela), Ca2M (Madrid), San Telmo Museum (San Sebastián), Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), Fine Arts Museum (Bilbao), TBK Centre of Contemporary Culture (San Sebastián), Artium, Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country (Vitoria), Musac or Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León.
Some of his video installations are part of the Contemporary Art Collection. La Caixa. CGAC Collection, Galician Centre of Contemporary Art. Bilbao Art Collection, Contemporary Art Collection of the University of Vigo and also private collections.
For the last two years he has been living in a small cabin in the Ancares region of Lugo. In collaboration with the A Coruña-based production company Zeitun films, he is working on the second phase of writing the script for Memoria de Anxos_ Mise Abyme, a non-binary film that tries to dismantle the nature-culture binomial in the key of a romantic-apocalyptic fable. Last summer he carried out research for the WKV – Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart – on the concept of petromasculinity applied to the German automobile industry, which has helped him to specify and improve aspects of the script.