Process
El Ojo Heredado (2018-2020) brings together a series of investigations on the professional side of my grandfather through his architecture archive, which helped me to get closer to him and understand his point of view as a creator. By using his tools and working processes, I appropriate the role of the architect to link photography and architecture.
To fully immerse in the dreamlike world of the archive, I put myself in the shoes of my grandfather when creating, and I take the processes as a performance in which I mix with my grandfather to create an intermediate author.
The work moves in the space that separates the science from the fiction, the ambiguous from the specific, the photography from the architecture and the grandfather from the grandson, with the intention, not of setting limits, but creating hybrids capable of opening possible interpretations.
During this project, the way in which I have approached the archive has changed as I was making it my own. I have grouped these changes into the following chapters:
1. Architecture of a gaze: I discover the archive, play with its material and use my grandfather’s cameras to take pictures of his buildings. I explore the unfinished, the material nature and the fragility. I question the difference between a ruined building and a half-built one.
2. The interpreter: I appropriate the images of my grandfather to make them ambiguous, strange and useless. If those files were designed to know reality, I turn them into the opposite: tools for ignorance. I explore the transformation of space represented by the traces left by the construction and visualisation processes.
3. The architect and the dream: I assume the role of the architect and build models of ambiguous places to photograph them. I reproduce the dreamlike character of the archive and interpret it, enhancing its ambiguity.
In short, The Inherited Eye is a way of investigating my family artistic background, to use it as a starting point in the search for what makes up my way of looking and therefore, of understanding reality.
