Behind blue eyes // Tell me how close we are to a riot is the title of a project that was developed on and off from 2013 to 2017.
It is a project on the youth of Bilbao and the intermittent feeling of despair that overcame us after the 2008 economical crisis. Bilbao has always been a very active city in terms of political and social movements and specially linked to the creation of musical bands in the punk scene and this is the way we have learned to make an active caring system in an apparent violent scene.
In words of curator Julia Morandeira "[...] It is an experiment conducted between and against us, with and for others, a constant invention more of the form of sociability and less of its content, fashioned in the danger of being against society but together, conspiring. Helena's photographs point exactly to this: to inventing forms of mutual support, devices for complicity which are strained and, therefore, unstable, which bear our weight whilst they expose us. And a great deal of gestures that explore caring, touch and contact. This is clearly seen in the abundance of skin, hands and embraces that appear in the photographs; entangled hands, as though clinging to a chain, legs which protrude and intertwine, affectionate arms and a great deal of skin that touches and is touched. These are ways in which the collective and the personal are muddled and contaminated, balanced between the intimacy of the portrait of a room and the vast scope of Bilbao's landscape. Ways in which shared sensitivity draws new territory."
