Illustrated lecture

The light pollution we live with nowadays does not just significantly effect human, animal and plant health but also creates an electric curtain preventing us from observing the night and what it can reveal. It’s as if society were scared of the dark.

I find artistic drive in realities where class relationships are key. I use the archive as a starting point for my research and fragmentation as narrative form. Recently, I have come to realise that absence and search are concepts that regularly come up in my work. Over the next few months, I will observe and read the landscape in search of the almost hidden footprints of a time passed.

To connect with the territory of Navarre in a tangible way, I acquired the negative of a photograph taken in Pamplona. It shows a couple, separated by a noticeable space between them. It is dated one year and one month after the start of the war. In that void, that gap, I hope to discover something.

I intend to find the memory of the dark, in the hope that those footprints from the past concealed by the light of today can manifest themselves somehow, either visually or audibly. I will collect what happened (or happens) without light, such as the escape of prisoners from Fort San Cristobal or the process of developing a photograph. I want to filmically explore the night (and memory) during development of the project for X Films. I will switch off the lights and wait.

Pablo Casanueva