Presencio

“To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence” (The little prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

I am the daughter of Jesus, Encarna’s son, but also Tomás’s granddaughter, and the youngest daughter of Tomasita, and this is my vision about the rural environment of Castile. Where people just see a whole of nothing, I see things. And I want to show them.

This is not a photographic project about rural depopulation. It is about identity and memory of this transition spaces. In villages, there is a family background backing you up. Whether you want or not, you may be part of its history. You belong to the collective mind and it does not matter if people know you by sight or not, they just know that you exist and where you are coming from: “Who your parents are?” Coming from this reflection I am wondering if spaces can disappear. That is to say, do spaces stay in collective memory? Even when they are destroyed? Thereby, I take pictures of the villages where I grew up. These places became other places at the same time because they are the result of many generations that have inhabited them. At the end I find myself in spaces existing in a time with no time, in a place with no place, speaking about people with no people in there. Between progress and the return I am blindly looking for. The resulting pictures are the testimony of my dialogue with this spaces.