Under the skin

I choose my contemporaries in the anonymity of the big cities because their faces, Under the skin, narrate unique, remarkable stories about our era. Sometimes hostile, almost always fragile and very often wounded behind the opacity of their masks, they represent specific social realities and, sometimes, another concept of beauty. I also try to approach the unclassifiable, timeless individual, to suggest things that have been repeated over and over since time began. I would like to encourage crossing a border. The history of the last few decades in the West, immigration, migrations, rural exodus, the feminist movement, the sexual revolution, economic crisis, the age of communication, globalization...all this has profoundly contributed to modifying mentalities and lifestyles to the point of severing the social fabric.

I search in the meeting points of the urban scene : streets, squares, cafes, stations, universities... then further still, in the peripherical districts, places so isolated from the world, and in more marginal settings, such as prisons, hospitals, social shelters, rehabilitation centers, monasteries, or circuses. Because our society is there as well. Lately, I have been approaching certain minorities and communities that have been displaced for ethnic, economic or political reasons, whether these be gypsies or people from Balkans and the Maghreb recently immigrated to Spain. My last project, is still on developpment. I am travelling, and setting my studio “On the road”, in the secret and hidden rural areas of the Peninsula Ibérica, from Andalucia to Galicia and Portugal, along the former “Ruta de la Plata”, looking for different human conditions: farmers communities, fishermen and coal minors. I question faces and open spaces, landscapes; seeking something different in nature and under the earth.

Every day, in the photographic ritual, I am building, little by little, my self-portrait. I thus try to hold back time to write my diary, listening to others breathe and leaving a trace upon the ephemeral. At the same time it is an act of rebellion against oblivion.