Such is the Silence

The ongoing project Such is the Silence deals with the inevitable passing of time and the layers formed by it. It also ponders on life and identity of a place or a human being. The starting point for my artwork –that has been shot in abandoned houses in Valencia, Spain– has been the body’s impact on time and space. Through my artwork I raise questions about the places, events happened in the rooms and the (past) presence of unknown people and their memories. I want the viewer to sense the lived life beneath my static pictures. The most interesting thing in these houses is what you cannot see and it is what thrives me to enter these deserted places. In my works I insert my presence in places where it doesn’t belong and I play with the contradiction between myself and the site. Without any prior relation to the location and space, the experience is born only by performing to or with the camera. Through this performative act I want to emphasise the tension that comes from the other’s memories combined with my personal process of making an image. I’m interested in the way photography and video seem to represent reality but are also used in creating fictional worlds. My works are not set in the past nor in the present. They can be manifested as real without really being it, the same way Gabriel García Marquez writes about a town called Macondo in his book Hundred years of solitude (1971). In the book Macondo is presented as real but due to surreal happenings the reader is left to wonder if the town exists after all. The work Such is the Silence can refer to one's “inner world” or subconscious but one can also think of it as a psychological mystery: narratives from a world, where the protagonist is the character seen in the pictures. In my works several abandoned buildings melt into one and the idea of a house gains symbolic value i.e a metaphor for identity.