Alberto Feijoo – Alicante, 1985


We used to meet at two different places.

One was dark and sober. Through the windows you could see the garden surrounding the building. It was always a mess.

The other meeting place was very different. The lower walls were wood paneled and on the upper ther were costumbrist paintings representing daily scenes of the victorian period. It was an over decorated venue with no good views of the outside. From one of the windows you could see an old furniture factory.

Yet there were some similarities, in both places the chairs were made of plastic, very cold in winter when you sat on them.

The only purpose of those meetings was to listen to each other. People talked about their family issues, problems at work or even about their sexual life, amongst other topics.

I Want You is an 18 photographs series.

It´s based on a testimony made by one of the people portrayed.

This collection of black cloths in which the sun and the pass of time keep on blurring the image of the Bonito’s crew members, tries to be a memory of the people who experienced many of the whims of the sea that never should have happened





























Click here if you want to learn about the making of “Bonito”

Eduardo Nave – Valencia, 1976


The idea of emptiness is scary. There is nothing more complex than accepting that there’s nothing after something. After the noise, there is silence. After death, oblivion.

Nowadays there are increasingly places devoted to memory and commemoration. However, what we remember and celebrate only reinforces the oblivion and makes it more evident. Memorials deny the memory of the place itself and the scenario of the commemoration is nothing but the place where death happened.

At the time and the place shows initially unimportant places that have become significant due to the deaths in terrorist attacks committed by ETA in Spain and France, from the Sixties to the present. They are ordinary places, places without interest, without specificity, they are places not to remember but to forget; places where today nothing is left but emptiness.

Irreverent with oblivion, beyond the material alteration of space, Eduardo Nave seeks to capture, at the precise time and place of the past event, what remains where nothing is left. He reveals the hidden scar. Rather than a photograph, he presents the audience an authentic, sensitive experience, an experience of contrasts: the contrast between images of stillness and traces of a state of unrest, between appearances of ordinary places and experiences of extraordinary emotional atmospheres, between the silence of life and the noise of death.

Through photography we approach, perceive, look, and finally capture. And once we capture we remember, unveil and deny the void. Eduardo Nave tries to make what escapes last. He tries to recover the memory from the places where it belongs. Where we forget it.

Maybe the light, the atmosphere, the sound. Maybe the absurd attempt to rescue the memory.

“Evo doesn’t like us”, they complain referring to the president Morales. And, unfortunately for them, the government is now increasing environmental control that prevents them from cutting the forest. The colonies are not sure how to deal with the growing ‘influence of the locals’, which means easier access to alcohol, music and cars. Some will eventually decide to leave the colony for a new and more isolated one, where the forest is yet to be cut, and Bolivian towns are tens of dusty kilometers away. But still Mennonites will always be a considered a source of income for Bolivians, and they know this. Sometimes they have to go to the city, but they don’t drive, they have cattle but no way to sell it. So no matter where they settle again, soon taxi drivers will start driving around, cattle buyers will pass with their trucks, and just a while after a little shop will be placed right at the entrance of the colony. New countries in which to settle are difficult to find, and so is new land in Bolivia, so the feeling of ‘getting to the end’ of a period is felt all around the community.

And, in this very moment, the camera becomes an extension of his emotions, his most nimble prosthesis, a new organ that hunts down images, that shoots at everything it encounters, almost without looking. Using the strength of instinct as the momentum for its actions.

[...]

“Arrelat” , routed underground, is that which comes from the depths, from the interior, from the recesses. From the inside out is the way in which Roger takes his photographs, like I said, from the stomach. And at the same time he is rooted, taking part, getting comfortable, staying put and getting to know.

Guaus travels to the center of his village, in search of everyday experiences, nothing extreme, simply hunting and mixing together the decisive moments with the not so decisive moments.

(Extracts from the text by Tanit Plana which accompanies he exhibition “Arrelat”)

Only a few optimists supported the project by Edward Makuka, the school teacher in charge of presenting the ambicious program and getting its necessary funding. But the financial aid never came, as the United Nations declined their support, and one of the astronauts, a 16 year old girl, got pregnant and had to quit. That is how the heroic iniciative turned into an exotic episode of the african history, surrounded by wars, violence, droughts and hunger.

As a photojournalist I have always been attracted by the excentric lines of story-telling avoiding the same old subjects told in the same old ways. Now, with my personal projects, I respect the basis of the truth but allow myself to break the rules of veracity trying to push the audience into analyzing the patterns of the stories we consume as real.

“Afronauts” is based on the documentation of an impossible dream that only lives in the pictures. I start from a real fact that took place 50 years ago and rebuild the documents adapting them to my personal imagery.

Linarejos Moreno – Madrid, 1974


In the face of the impending demolition of the factory, I summoned the wailers so that they wept, so that they performed the theater of pain caused by the inevitable death of the space. All operatives were assembled for the funeral banquet which, following tradition, was presided over by the deceased: the industrial building at the time it went out of business, just before it was brought down. Lastly, I created the installation art piece Lacrymatories, with threads and black hair spinning a spiderweb among the machines. This funeral installation was built in a ritual manner, with the intention of remaining inside the building during the demolition and until it perished. Placed within, its mission was to accompany the deceased on its journey to the hereafter.
 
But with the arrival of the crisis, the hasty conversion of the industrial area remained paralyzed. The workers went to work in other factories and the wreck remained forgotten in a sea of uncertainty. Then I asked the women of the workers, dressed as members of a religious brotherhood  to weave a spider’s web amidst the machinery. Afterwards, in the dark they used scissors to cut the tensed strands while the flash and camera recorded the action. After that they left, in silence.

The government says that he will ensure my rights.

I could be sacrificed voluntarily,
or involuntarily, in exchange for perceived benefits,
for myself or for someone else,
with a “relative” benefit
and with specific losses and risks.

…I am changing my mind about myself.

However, by focusing on a different way on politics and its leaders, trying to use the camera in decomposition, it is also possible to make photography censor censorship and then, negative against negative, offer something positive, some new perspectives on politicians and their superficial status, revealing how the state they defend so hardly vanishes by their actions, their images and all the paraphernalia that surrounds the ivory tower in which they believe they live in.