REMIND ME WHERE I HAVE NEVER BEEN Curated by Marina Ribera
This group exhibition brings together three mid-career and established Spanish photographers. Their works explore identity issues through appearances, memories and the relationship between reality and fiction.
At different levels, the three series of works play around building a parallel story alongside reality. The blend of social documentary and staged reality in Marta Soul’s Wellhome series suggests new identity roles and different ways of looking at immigration. Paco Valverde portrays the soul of absent characters in El Capricho de lo Cotidiano (Indulgence of the Everyday Life) but, subtly, the particularities of these ordinary lives and its objects turn into a very recognizable story, almost as if we were experiencing the reminiscence of an old memory. Finally, Álvarez Yagüe uses the visual effect in Memoria Frágil (Fragile Memory) to evoke the mechanisms of our mind and how we construct (or re-construct) our own identity.
Using the everyday life as a starting point, these Spanish photographers have found a new realm in between reality and fiction. These works suggest stories that never happened but that we all have in our minds. Are these photographers simply good observers of the common place? Or is this fictional reality a new way to address our individuality?
WELLHOME (2008) Marta Soul
The Wellhome series are portraits of displaced women, even though at first glance there is nothing to indicate that they are immigrants. The polished setting and careful style could lead us to believe that it is hiding a reality, often presented in a more dramatic and urgent way; mainly, in the common photo-journalism tones. However, this project lays out the points that photo-journalism representations tend to exclude from the theme of migratory crisis. These photographs do not only talk about exodus. They portray an unusual connection between immigration and the domestic paradise of the middle class. They may be lacking in drama but on the other hand they suggest a link which is all too often overlooked. Posing in new apartments, next to radiators and brand new beds, these feminine bodies leave behind the victim code which traps them in a cycle of precariousness. Suddenly, all endemic transitions have been broken. They have started to occupy the places previously reserved to other women's dreams. This is why the fictional quality of the series does not jeopardize the connection with such a complex and real phenomenon that is immigration.
EL CAPRICHO DE LO COTIDIANO (2001-2004) Paco Valverde
Indulgence of the Everyday Life (2001-2004)
Indulgence of the Everyday Life intends to bring closer to the viewer the identity of those who inhabit or inhabited the rooms in the pictures. The final domestic landscape is the metaphor of those lives. Each photograph contains details of an everyday life that unveils routines, a rhythm and personal gestures. Each photograph is a respectful portray of the person’s peculiarities and even oddities. However, the intimacy and particularity of these settings do not refrain us from taking these moments as very familiar ones, almost as our own. The traces of the everyday, mostly overlooked by all of us, take shape now in our minds, delicately, as a vague memory.
MEMORIA FRÁGIL (2008) Julio Álvarez Yagüe
Fragile Memory (2008)
We take for granted the ordinary, our everyday life and we do not realise the changes that time operates on it. Changes happen second after second and this makes it imperceptible to our eyes. As time goes by, the unavoidable happens and we stop seeing what our memory had registered long ago. We have lost our usual patterns. Memory is fragile and it takes time to dig up buried pictures. Like water, memory gives shape or blurs things but, sooner or later, these become recognizable again. Fragile Memory served the author as a self-reflection activity and it explores the notions of loss, appearances and identity. Memory and its changing states can be understood as a metaphor on how we construct our identity and how this is perceived by others. The beauty of this work goes beyond its conceptual roots. The abstract aesthetic and visual plasticity of the pictures materialize the malleable qualities of the memory.
