Las flores mueren dos veces

"Las Flores mueren dos veces" is a photographic project about a reconciliation. My father's name was Margarito -like the flower Daisy in Spanish- he was a gardener and he died for the first time when I was 15. When I turned 30, It was revealed to me that his death had been a suicide, that was when he died for the second time. In his goodbye letter, the last words he chose said: "Forgive me and communicate with me."

From this, I seek to shape his absence through images and establish a dialogue between our worlds. Photography serves as a starting point to question personal narratives, rethink the historical function of gardens, and explore a newly created universe where plants serve as a bridge.

After receiving this new information, I became obsessed with my own memories and how this affected them. By revisiting family albums and manipulating the structural data of the photographs in them, I question the images and the memories associated with them. If my memories were changing, then those photographs connected to them should be different as well. From this experimentation, I create new images that serve as a metaphor for corrupted memories. I see both my personal story and the images that go along with them as fluid information, an ever-changing dataset that is always evolving.

After his death, the relationship with my father lived on. I find it in trees and plants. According to the ideas of Santiago Beruete in Jardinosofía, since the Renaissance, gardens have been conceived as a place of encounter for humans with themselves and with nature. Using as a reference the landscape plans of the last garden in which my father worked on and the plants that he bred and to this day are still alive, I use photogrammetry techniques to create a digital garden composed of images that establish a dialogue between photography, memory, the digital world and the organic.

This project is both an answer to the last words my father wrote and an invitation to think about all the relationships that we once formed and that continue to develop after death.