Since our childhood we have been attracted to empty mansions, places that show in their ruins the remains of their former uses, places inhabited by treasures and ghosts. I remember having visited powerful places of industrial archaeology in Segovia, old brick factories, electricity factories, photographic laboratories or the Faience Factory, all of them empty and open to adolescent curiosity.
I still have some of the treasures I found there: an architect's tape measure, some negatives of military photographs on gelatine and glass.
I also remember my desire to photograph ghosts with long shutter exposures in places lit by torchlight.
This space of the abattoir of Monzón de Campos is a space saved from collapse as were not those others, which I remember with the affection reserved for an old acquaintance. However, this space is also open to memory. Elements of industrial archaeology emerge, questioning its new use, this new coexistence with art, which always allows us to invoke what is outside our limits.
Collage as an artistic technique is both a tool of destruction and creation; it is the first attempt at sustainable, recycled art. These stones are assemblages of images on building rubble that are placed on the ground to invent a future or a past time.
Nature occupies the artificial space when people leave, which is why I look down on this room, which could be invaded by the countryside around it. The tiles show us a space that wants to look clean, as opposed to the dirt that comes from the beings that live and die. The ceramics have that air of improved nature that does not resist returning to the earth, but retains the brightness of what was once its function.
I pick up rationalist squares from the tiled walls to frame my family ties like those traced in white kitchens and bathrooms like this room.
I enjoy working with photographs as representations of something and as objects in themselves. Their deterioration becomes a metaphor for the passage of time, oblivion and memory. I recycle images, phrases, poems, creating new texts, initially separated from a linear narrative. These ethereal photographs recover fragments of printed media. I did this to construct pictorial poems that subtly reflect the excesses of contemporary visual culture. In my case, my work reflects my self-representations over time and my aging process. The blackboards, paradoxically, look to me like paleolithic mobile screens with their social media messages.
