Country Fictions

"We search for years, we imagine our future in better places where we could start over. We leave the city behind travelling for miles and miles, driven by hopes and dreams. Maybe there was once a countryside, a village with green and fertile meadows. Now we return to find only the remains of a disused scenery. We pursue a fiction, that of a peaceful rural life. We search for beauty in a landscape where we do not belong, where time seems to have stopped still. We live our own transition, our fragile utopia, trying to understand what we are doing here and who we are." About the project: Produced between 2011 and 2013, these images are the result of a series of travels to different rural areas and scarcely populated regions of the Iberian Peninsula. As several close friends began to think about moving to the country, I was confronted with the idea of leaving the city myself and starting a new life closer to nature. In Country Fictions, reality and my imagination come together to deal with my distant relationship with the rural environment and the emotions brought about by the idea of taking that big step. In what could be called a collection of daydreams, Country Fictions reflects on the photographic language itself and how we are influenced by previous representations and preconceived ideas about rural utopias. The illusion of escaping from contemporary society, the myths and hopes built around nature come together with the strangeness and the nostalgic look at a life that I might never live.