For most of us, photography is a means of storing memories. But it can also be a valuable tool to understand and learn more about ourselves and the world around us. And that is what Albarrán Cabrera has been doing, the artistic tandem formed by Anna Cabrera (Seville, 1969) and Ángel Albarrán (Barcelona, ??1969) since they found a common ground twenty-seven years ago where what is important is not the place where they shoot their cameras but the motivations that lead them to do so. Better known internationally than in Spain -their work is represented by a dozen galleries, from the US to Japan-, right now they have simultaneous exhibitions in Zurich, Amsterdam, Landskrona (Sweden) and Barcelona, ??specifically at Foto Colectania, which dedicates his first major monograph in a museum space, The Indestructible, until January 7.
Anna Cabrera, a philologist, and Ángel Albarrán, an engineer and mathematician, met in 1987, and the first thing they did when they moved in together was buy a mattress and set up a developing laboratory in the smallest room in the house. “Photography has always been part of our lives, but we never had the intention of dedicating ourselves to it professionally. It was in our day to day, taking pictures, spending the weekends locked in the laboratory experimenting, learning… One day someone told us that we should show what we were doing and, suddenly, everything was growing, growing and growing”. To the point that the small laboratory ended up colonizing the rest of the rooms in the house, of which only the kitchen and bathroom have survived, and that it has even ended up expelling its inhabitants.
“Photography is always the incentive that pushes us through life,” says Albarrán. “It is the trigger for our reading, for short courses, for the movies we watch or the trips we take. Images come out of all that is intertwined with our lives”. Handmade images that go in search of beauty and through which they investigate issues such as time, memory or identity. “We are not interested in the image reproducing reality. The reality is what you have in front of you, it is already set up. The important thing is how you reinterpret that reality”, adds Cabrera. And that is where their work in the laboratory comes in, an artisan process in which they experiment with a wide variety of traditional techniques or their own invention (platinum/palladium, cyanotype, digital printing, silver gelatin, jet of ink, color pigments, gold leaf…). This is how they manage to transform images into objects capable of triggering the memories of the viewer. “We are all memory, we are all past”, they agree.
In the case of This Is You Here, a series in which images from the family album are juxtaposed with others found on the street, generating the identity of someone who never existed, leaving the viewer to fill in the faces that do not leave us with their own experiences and memories. see. The Indestructible, the exhibition that brings together almost a hundred works at Foto Colectania, covers some of his best-known series, such as The Mouth of Krishna “which is not finished and will never end” and which is inspired by a story from mythology Hindu that tells how the Buddha, as a child, was reprimanded by his mother for eating dirt. By opening the mouth of little Krishna to remove the dirt, Yashoda, her mother, was able to see the entire universe within her. “In each part of nature we find the universe as a whole,” says Cabrera.
Most of the images come from the natural world (trees, water, mountains), many taken on his recurring trips to Japan. They are printed on delicate Japanese calligraphy paper and then mounted on a surface covered with gold leaf, giving them an inner glow. “The processes -they conclude- is what gives us the syntax to be able to reinterpret what we capture and give an explanation that goes far beyond the simple image you have in front of your eyes”.
