Mi Querida Sevilla
Human beings, plants or cosmic dust: we all dance under a mysterious melody tuned in the space by an invisible musician. Albert Einstein
Seville is a secret city; as bright as it is, it never completely reveals itself. Seville is a lover that doesn't let you go, it always wants to know where you are, even if it doesn't need you. This land is the point of arrival of a long journey, in which nobody ever settled for good. Here have arrived the gypsies, whose origins are lost in a mythical time of a journey begun in far away India. A thin line links the East and the West, and you can hear it in music, in dance, in the ways of life. An explosive sensuality is apparent in the flamenco dance, even though the stories it tells are not always merry. The moves of the flamenco contain all those primordial gestures at the origin of all theatre facts, and this dance has at times the power of a prayer that the dancers have the duty to perform. This dance combines the sacred and the profane, male and female, sensuality, courtship and denial; flamenco is a dance of contrasts.
Seville reveals and hides itself to the eye, enclosed in its stark contrasts; its roads stop, confuse, following an Arab plan. At the corners of the streets, in a strong light, the dance, the bailaoras and a minimal landscape all blend to give life to a portrait: the image of the sentiment of a place. Seville defends itself, it remains popular and maintains its genius loci of which the flamencos, femininity, the heat, the magic with its 'duende' are a fundamental part.
I went back to Seville twenty years after having lived there, wanting to restore the sense of a personal memory without having to speak of myself, but rather looking for a light of the memory which would caress or hit the walls that are part of my soul. My memories are linked to secondary roads, small street of the city centre and of its popular peripheries. I encountered these familiar streets which have become the backdrop of my images, as if building a theatre of the memory, where dance, be it happy or not, could accompany weightlessly the thoughts, the dreams, the memories.
THIRD PLACE in Portfolio cat. @ MOSCOW INTERNATIONAL FOTO AWARDS MIFA 2017