Intento de Brillar (Attempting to shine)

Work as the residue of a process, brilliance as the expression of the ineffable, and failure as a productive opportunity for a detour. Installation as a maze or an altar for the image. Photobook as an artifact that invites you to play a serious game.

‘Attempting to Shine: A Brief Essay on Outer Appearances and Inner Suffering’ is a project that spans ten years of mourning, an indeterminate process in which images help to rebuild, in their own distorted way, the fabric of relationships torn apart by illness. A series of photographs which, as though they were an intuitive map of re-enactments, seek the everyday as ritual and trace a narrative in suspension.

In a society obsessed with projecting a yearning for happiness and efficiency that is often at odds with our inner experience, photography affords a directional gaze, a fragile, untimely ordering towards a purpose in life.

Attempting to Shine is an attempt to find somewhere to live in the space between what one has suffered and one’s appearance.

After being diagnosed with a demyelinating disease, the construction of this accumulation of images acted not only as a companion to uncertainty and suffering, but also as an affirmation of a concrete, complex and vulnerable identity that asserts its right to pain, pleasure, fear and brazenness.

Each image is an attentive listening to individual resonances, a creator of connecting affinities; they are simulations that testify to the unresolved and return a possibility, an experiment, an annotation to transcend.

 Intento de Brillar was a solo exhibition curated by Jesús Micó for Sala Kursala of the University of Cádiz, SP. It is also a book designed by Javi al Cuadrado.