top of page

I never knew my grandfather Emilio.

From his suitcases filled with slides and his words written in books, I could feel how the desert passed through him. That heroic scenario of wind and emptiness demanded his presence, calling him to an uncertain destiny. In his photographs, and in those of those who followed him, I saw fragments of a territory over and over again, along different generations, as if something in that landscape kept us gravitating around it. An endless and invisible horizon, a space defined by absence, leave a mark on a family that looks in a direction where there is nothing to see.

It is nature, mutable, eternal, that observes us and portrays us. It is the scent of the moment in this land that persists and reminds me of the shared past.

We all have a landscape that passes through us while we try to capture it.

As if I were opening the drawer of an old piece of furniture, I began rescuing fossils, classifying maps, arranging photos, drawings, letters and travel diaries. As the archaeologist of the family archives, I was reconstructing a story, its multiple dimensions, its shadows. Turning it around, I looked at it from different angles. From the life of a man to the foundation of a family, a tribe, a town. From the immeasurable strength of the territory to the first maps, mediation, occupation and domain. From the fossil remains of a past to the walks through the bleak desert without borders. I was suspended on the edges of recognition, I was the man lost in the landscape.

The wildness appeared in my dreams like an animal.

bottom of page