Insula

Insula is a photographic project around the father figure and family memory. This story began in 2018, during my father's hospitalization in a psychiatric center for paranoid dementia and ended last year with his suicide by hanging.

The hospitalization of my father - a mystical, excessive, and marginal painter - abruptly opened a memory trap door. Faced with my father's paranoid and amnesiac interpretation of the world around him, and the broken movements of his psychotic thought, I began a long introspective work, an attempt to investigate and reread this story that was impossible to tell - because of the forgetting, the silences induced by his absence, and the mechanisms of loyalty and guilt that resulted. I proceeded by accumulating fragments, images, archives, texts, moments of life, to express the impossibility of telling this story in a linear, rational, figurative and narrative way. I went in search of what was passed down from father to son, in search of the traumas that are born of oblivion and silence. By going back to the time of the Spanish grandfather's exile, I reconsidered my father's destiny and choices from a new angle: his violence comes from another violence, that of his own father, a stateless officer who had survived the camps. A broken man who broke his children.

My father has just died. After spending his life destroying everything around him, his paintings, his manuscripts, his professional relationships, his friendships, his family, his health (through sleep and food deprivation and the excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol in order to access a mystical perception of the world), he took his own life. In a way, this suicide was the ultimate creative act of his life. His entire creation was an immense and powerful act of destruction.

Beyond the intimate character of this life story, it is also about taking into account what is universal in any family trajectory, to probe how the great History brutally strikes the tiny history of individuals, and to consider the guilt, the unspoken, the violence that this generates, up to madness.

Insula is the island of my ancestors, Menorca, which has become by salt and wind a washed out metaphor of my memories. A far and bruised island, whose fissured rocks make to bring to the surface the absence, the abandonment and the pain of exile. Insula is also a small and complex part of our brain - the insular cortex – which governs emotions such as empathy and risk-taking, and which plays a decisive role in the psychological phenomena of addiction and paranoia.