In Utero
In Utero is about those times.
It is about the incredible and terrifying confinement that the world is experiencing. And in the impossibility of going out to photograph, I turned my eyes inside. First into the house. Into my family. This path that took me inside myself. When I saw it, it was already there. It is autobiographical, as it could not be otherwise. The strange sensation of waking up to a cinematic dystopia. Real script where I am one of the characters. There are no good guys to save us in the end, not least because we don’t know if there will be an end.
Anguish that erodes day after day dreams that were being built. A reality of poses and fictional success collapsed that each person embodied. Stripped of the control we thought we had of our lives, I dive with everyone, in an ocean of uncertainty and pain. Each piece of ice that melts is like tears that flow for each one who has not been saved, for each family that has lost part of itself. It is no longer possible to walk through the idea of life, consumption, possessions. It seems that the world has hit the pause. The feeling that we freeze life at some point to thaw ahead, in a new situation that we don’t know how it will be, or when it will be.
I took all my good emotions from the family, which had occasionally been frozen in photos and frozen them redundantly. It was like taking my feelings and pausing them for a while. Never has the mushy phrase “photographing is eternalising a moment” made so much sense. I wanted to protect those scenes that already existed, somewhere where I felt they would be safe, that they would not lose their essence, that they would not cease to have existed. My emotions on those occasions would be protected from what is happening. And of these dense emotions, I chose the last phase of my life, as it was the most intense of all.
My love with a woman, who became a third person. Love that materialized like Valentina. And on all fours, we became one. Thus, the pregnancy so intensely experienced by us, took on a heavenly air in involuntary cracks in the ice. The baby photographed minutes after birth, appears to have returned to the womb in an ice capsule. We all return to the womb of life. With each freeze, the surprise of the uncontrollable behaviour of the water that solidifies with its cracks and natural bubbles. We are stationed here, protecting ourselves from the invisible, perplexed by the unimaginable situation. Although the photos show situations of affection in the family, there is a natural melancholy that the ice imposes, involuntarily sending some scenes to paintings, which clearly make up my personal cultural repertoire.
In Utero opens up all my cauldron of confused, anxious feelings, eager to want a normality to return that may no longer exist.
