El recinto
circular
2023
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In Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Circular Ruins, a man arrives at the ruins of a temple in the jungle –the circular enclosure– with a supernatural purpose: to create another man, piece by piece, in dreams, only to later realise that he is himself the product of someone else’s dream.
As in Borges’ story, dreams and reality overlap in this project. It is a series of images where time seems to have been suspended, and what remains is confusing, as if what we see isn’t real but unconscious. These images function like sediments, with no spatial or temporal connection, meeting in another place or accumulating in a crevice after being carried by the same river.
Fascinated by the mind’s ability to create images without conscious or rational intervention, I aimed to represent the idiosyncrasy of those unconscious thoughts and visions through my editing process and the relationships between images. The effect is enhanced by particular codes these thoughts and visions operate with: fragmentation, repetition, loops, time skips, images that echo others, stairs that go nowhere, landscapes as mental spaces, and elements that disappear and reappear transformed into another thing.
The resulting series is composed of photographs taken in Iceland, France, Uruguay, and Spain, alongside images I found in antique shops. Yet, somehow, they all seem to belong to the same place, functioning like hidden clues to be deciphered or unraveled. Ultimately, it presents a dialogue on how both photographic editing and our unconscious mental processes can disrupt the inherent meaning of an image.
This project was awarded the Fotolibro <40 prize, thanks to which it was published as a photobook in 2023, shortlisted in 2024 in the PhotoESPAÑA Award for Best Photography Book of the Year and the APhF Pick:24 Book Award of the Athens Photo Festival.
