There is a quote that is at the core of this project:
“Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.”
Reiner Maria Rilke
This project was done in a fully physical process. It consisted of 6 rolls of film. Adding up to 216 photographs of which 20 were selected, and 11 were eventually printed. The film was developed by me. I enlarged them in the darkroom in the photography laboratory in La Casa Encendida into Ilford 24×30,5cm Photographic Paper.
I chose this medium because of two things: it’s slower and I’m not familiar with it.
Film, and even more so darkroom enlarging, is slow. You have a limit to the amount of photographs you can take, and in the moment of printing, each print takes 40-60 minutes to figure out and another 20 to perfect. It’s slow, but it makes what you do purposeful, it makes you reflect on the image in front of you, and why it needs to be there, why it matters.
This was essential to the project I wanted to do. Most of the images in the project, even if shot months ago (and found their home here) or in the past weeks, I only saw once I got the negatives. I only saw them with their true tones once I dipped them into the chemicals and the dark hues rose into the blank paper.
Figuring both the medium and the project out at the same time made me reach the involvement needed for the project. The self-reflection it demanded from me.
I chose to show the edges in the film, the end results as something that is not perfected or polished, as something that is bare and natural. In the same way, a kid does a drawing and doesn’t worry about going over the edges, but the meaning of what he is drawing.
This project is at its essence an exploration of my childhood through the things that were important to me as a kid, the space I go to when I want to go back to those things, and the place from which I do so.
It is divided into three parts which at times overlap:
Objects
Its objects as memories. Objects as monuments to my grief. Monuments to my childhood.
-The first camera I used, which I remember using in the fields north of Madrid.
-A painting for my mother done the 5-03-2011 titled “Polo sur.” Which I never forgot about. In the back of it, in loose pen strokes:
Nombre del cuadro: Polo sur
Para: Mama de santiago
Firma:_________
Mi firma nueVa: santiago/
5-03-2011
-A McDonald Pikachu, which stood on my desk for many years, and which I did forget about. I remember now when I won it, and with whom.
-Other photographs done for the project, but which couldn’t be printed are:
My mother’s old Bird Book.
Peter Rabbit.
A Painting of the Mexican Eagle stained with coffee.
A Submersible Camera gifted by “el tío Santiago” from Mexico.
A hand-crafted patch by my first best friend Pedro with a chicken soldier that says “Nasia pa mori.”
All these images attempt to replicate how these objects live in my memory. The objects in their still essence, their disconnection and decontextualization from the real world and the past where they once held a deeper and tangible importance to me.
“Once we were children everywhere, now we only are in one place.” – Rilke
Escapes:
Escapes as in the place where I go to where I want to go back to my essence and my childhood.
Fields as something that grows and changes, where things die and bloom. A fabric from which things happen and are woven into. A place that moves and shifts but you’ll always know where to find.
Many of the photographs shot for this part were done in Sierra de Guadarrama, mountains whose routes I know like the streets to my house. Where I go back to my roots, where I can remove myself from the shifting distortions of the city, and where everything seems unquestionable.
“If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable.” – Rilke
The City
The City as the agent that molded me for better and worse. Which made me who I am as an adult. But also a place that gives purpose to the escapes and a cast over my childhood.
A still and well-composed image is difficult to make in a city that rushes and rustles, and is constantly moving and changing things.
The four photographs selected for this last part were taken in Washington. A 5-day trip where solitude brought me to a place where I could feel my inmost life confined by the form of its occupation. And where I realized the distance there is to my childhood. How strung I am from it as the city pulls me away into adulthood.
In Washington, I wrote entire journals at once, and I shot more than 16 rolls (576 individual frames). It was my greatest creative moment and an experience where I felt something, a detachment maybe, but also a connection, that I can’t really explain but I try to convey here with these photographs.
“Once you get to the ninth kingdom, there is no going back. It is the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will. It has many names.”
Sylvia Plath. Mary Ventura, and the Ninth Kingdom.
To go and see the project:
