Almudena

I have walked almost daily through the Almudena Cemetery in Madrid for years. Captivated by the aesthetic qualities of certain deteriorating photographic portraits on tombstones, I began pausing in front of them.

Almudena reflects on the relationship between the body and its representation. Through an interrogation of the portrait genre and its connection to identity, the project explores forms of representation that shift the focus from the individual to the anonymous and universal. 

I began to photograph and collect these portraits, amassing an archive of 'fossils' through which to explore the traces of the living and the dead. These images reveal the fragility of bodies undergoing transformation, transcending the frozen moment and the individual identity they depict. Despite failing as custodians of memory, these images have, in an autonomous and latent way, reclaimed their value as photographic documents. Their impermanence enables them to represent our own impermanence and the impermanence of all the memories associated with our existence.

The body is mortal and always will be, fulfilling the life cycle that culminates in death and the decomposition of matter. However, human beings seek to transcend, to remember, and to be remembered. This desire has given rise to artefacts designed to symbolically halt the body's dissolution and extend identity beyond death.

The project culminates in a piece that revisits the tradition of the death mask. Created from thousands of accumulated and processed portraits, the piece casted in bronze is conceived as Almudena: a collective, anonymous and shared face.