LA GUAREÑA

La Guareña is a region tormented by time, where the risk of disappearance begins to erode its identity. In a wild region where the wind blows and it hardly rains, the population ages with melancholy while the land moves towards oblivion.

La Guareña, in the southeast of the province of Zamora, is a region tormented by time, where the risk of disappearance begins to erode its identity. In a wild region where the wind blows and it hardly rains, the population ages with melancholy while the earth advances towards oblivion with no turning back. With an economy based on agriculture and livestock, there are no prospects for change. The region is the portrait of an emptied Spain.

The project built in New Documentalism focuses on a long-term personal story about the environment of the place where I grew up, showing three types of photography. Portraits that show the protagonists with a landscape that is built as a symbiosis where the solarigraphies are the description of the passage of time, the sun in its daily course draws the arc of the clock that determines the end of the cycle, a desperate sunset while the portraits They treasure the last generation that will inhabit the area. The essay is also built around a series of photographs, portraits and documents of daily life in the region.

The project captures a place disturbed by tension. The protagonists illuminated by a faint natural light as a persistent and imposing presence that infuses them with a palpable calm, is the vital iconic symbol of the precarious relationship with the earth and its metaphors.

Solarigraphy is a concept and photographic practice based on the observation of the sun's path in the sky (different in different places on Earth) and its effect on the landscape, captured through a process that combines pinhole photography and digital processing. . Using undeveloped photographic paper, a pinhole camera and a scanner, the daily path of the sun in the sky is captured with very long exposure times, ranging from several hours to many months.

The function of the essay shows a social portrait that documents the last times of a system and way of life that is disappearing.

Initiated as a concept a decade ago, the critical and honest praxis of photography has allowed me to access environments where abandonment and loneliness have been exposed through people who have allowed themselves to be photographed.

The project has a strong personal connection with my family, originally from this place.

My commitment and dedication to this work has left a deep mark on me; I have lived in the region for years and know many of the people I have photographed