Afanador

Inspired and fascinated as I was with the books Ángel Gitano and Mil Besos, when it came to putting together this show, I knew it could never be an attempt merely to copy the beauty therein. Ruven Afanador’s masterful photo sessions in Andalusia are unrepeatable: it would be impossible to repeat the alchemy that formed between the photographer and figures with such charisma as Israel Galván, Matilde Coral, Eva Yerbabuena, José Antonio and the BNE’s very own Rubén Olmo. 

My journey begins where those sessions end, and when I stop dreaming about them, unable to remember the full details or to subject them to a logic that has become lost along the way, that is when I find myself overcome by the desire to wake up. 

Afanador is born out of the tension between the fascination that emanates from Ruven Afanador’s photos and my own fascination for mystery, both of the day and the night, that so fascinated Ruven in his day. 

I studied photography and am the grandson of a photographer. Although I never took up photography professionally, it has always been very present in my work as a set director and creator of worlds. With his incredibly meticulous staging and evocative images, Ruven Afanador has forced me to reflect on the fundamental kinship between photographic and choreographic composition: the corporeal challenge shared by both: to capture life – that which, by definition, does not allow itself to be captured.

Ruven Afanador observes flamenco through a lens that is deforming, a lens made of dreams, desire and memories. If the elements of tradition are reassuring by definition, what happens when they become strange and unrecognisable? The surrealist gaze of Afanador towards flamenco is very similar to the gaze towards the world that has developed in my work over the years with La Veronal: one that tries not to represent the world that exists, but rather to invent new ones.

When asked about cinema, Estrella de Diego, whom I paraphrase, said: “One must enter that dark space without premeditation, with the film already having started, but without knowing beforehand what is being shown, dragged along by chance and fortune. One must sit down and abandon oneself to one’s senses without preparation, and the senses must not have been guided via opinions or synopses. One must go to the cinema in search of something other than the story that is being told. One must know that in the cinema, as in life, one always ends up identifying with oneself, and never the character or the plot.”

I would like people to come to see us in that frame of mind, as in certain dreams where we recognise places, people and landscapes – and without understanding the specific events, we know that they are really about us.

 Marcos Morau