All the images will disappear. Curated by Semíramis Gonzalez in Festival OFF PhotoEspaña

All the images will disappear

This curatorial project, presented at Galería Nueva – Atocha as part of the PHotoESPAÑA Off Festival, is a visual reflection on disappearance from multiple dimensions: the material, the symbolic, the emotional and the territorial. Based on a discourse inspired by the novel The Years by Annie Ernaux, this exhibition takes as its starting point a view that conceives the image as a hybrid and fluid device, whose layers fade over time, as suggested by authors such as Paul Virilio with his aesthetics of disappearance. From this conceptual basis, the exhibition presents photographic works that dialogue with the ontology of the image as a transitory entity and with the themes that it is capable of summoning up, from the intimate to the collective.

At the top of the gallery, Alva Martín, with Sentinel, questions the overproduction of images and technological surveillance. Her visual archive of ‘consensual surveillance’ highlights the dissolution of the intimate into the public, and how our identity is diluted in a permanent digital cloud, without body or memory.

Jesús Umbría presents Retaguardia, where he documents young people who find identity in post-pandemic underground subcultures. Photography here acts as a refuge from homogenisation, capturing belonging from the margins and revealing affective and aesthetic resistance.

Below, we find Así cantan los desiertos, where Alexandra Karam offers a sensorial journey to the desert landscape as a space for contemplation and spirituality, but also warns us about the human action that threatens these spaces, reminding us that the eternal is also fragile, and that the disappearance of ecosystems is a reflection of global deterioration.

Achim Boers addresses the disconnection between body and technology through the photographic technique of wet collodion, which contrasts with digital immediacy. His work is based on a premise and an invitation to reclaim the physical and our relationship with the tangible, in favour of our mental health.

Alejandra Nowiczewski dives into the transformation of negative emotions through Buddhist symbolism, using colour and nature as bridges to introspection. Her photographs evoke the disappearance of forms in favour of the symbolic, defying conventional visual language and embracing the ephemeral.

Finally, Miguel Gamart narrates the transformation of the mining area of Asturias after the closure of the mining activity. El cielo abierto portrays a mourning where the memory of the work and the landscape still persists, reminding us that everything that disappears leaves its mark, also in the territory.

All the images will disappear proposes a space for pause and reflection in the face of the contemporary rhythm, vindicating the image as a trace, a witness and a resistant body in the face of what is dissolving.

Semíramis González, curator of the exhibition.