Lost in Translation (Cricket Portraits)

My relationship with the UK goes back to my childhood. I’m a Spanish national, but part of my family is British. I have moved between both countries my whole life, able to live and work here or there as I pleased. My personal baggage is completely bilingual and bi-cultural. There is a last area of this culture that I am unable to penetrate: Cricket! I am sure this is not caused by intellectual inability, so I suspect that I have adopted this as a symbol of my “non-quite-belonging”, the last cultural gap which marks me as “non-quite-British”. All this was of no major importance until now, as there was no need to examine my ties, belonging or identity with respect to the place where I live, since it all happened seamlessly below a general “EU national umbrella”. But then came Brexit... And a Pandora’s Box of emotions was unleashed. I don’t recognise this country anymore and feel rejected and bereaved… My response to all this has been this body of work in which 23 Cricket players pose dressed in their traditional clothes but holding an incongruous unidentifyable object. They are inspired on the very English Tudor portraits in which some symbolic objects were incorporated into the painting holding some clues related to the sitter. These were understood only by a few – those intended for – but are incomprehensible for the contemporary viewer. Hence the title: Lost in Translation which refers to nuances and word plays that disappear when translating a text into another language which doesn’t allow for the same meanings or turns of phrase. Here the faces are also blurred, so to see them and to decipher the objects, the viewer will have to get close, unable to make quick assumptions, and forced to pay individual attention. This body of work questions the meaning and the value of being part of a closed group and by extension of a national identity, reinforcing the value of the individual.