Abstract

Cuando la tierra se parte en dos examines how deliberate and catastrophic forms of war and commerce disrupt the affective and cultural attachments that bind people to a place, and how these ruptures are rendered visible through the juxtaposition between archival imagery and my photographic practice. Inspired by critical spatial theory (Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space, 1974) the project incorporates archival photographs from the Spanish Civil War to activate latent memory within contemporary suburban and natural landscapes. Drawing found telegrams from the war, Spanish poems from authors such as Federico García Lorca or Miguel Hernández from that period (1930-1945) and quotes from different academics, (like David Harvey or Lorenzo Veracini) are included in the sequences between the photographs to create a dialogue between landscapes that share a history of control, displacement, and forgetting. Positioned as an autoethnographic research, it approaches landscapes as both material topographies and repositories of lived experience, as sites where identity, memory, and belonging are continuously negotiated and re-signified.