Lo que nos queda: Concha Pérez

Uninhabited places, ruins of a past routine, of habitats and habits that today seem remote, hidden by the flowing of time. Her photographs talk about the empty content of some spaces, but it is the emptyness itself that shows its content to us. They are not dead places. The change that makes this places look desert, obsolete, is the same change that express their kind of life. Her images do not represent an inanimate thing. The disuse, the desertion, not only refers to the transit and movement that one day took up those spaces, but also to the displacement of the activity to another place, so the energy only changes forms. It is the inertia of life that has been generating the place, and places that by the use and by the change we throw to caos show again theirselves, now through Concha’s look and under the form of a photograph. It is possible to consider that dissociation between content and contingent generates the strange. Life flow, its evolution, the everyday changes, unavoidably produce spaces to which what was bringing sense to them belong to the past. Concha’s photographs show the stangeness of the life at present‐time of the spaces forgotten by the flux of time.

What happen when a present space is habited by the past? How does this space, where two different times coexist, shows to us? Probably ghostly, generating inevitably an excess of sense, printing in the imagination of the spectator an image of what it was sometime, continously appearing, in an involuntery way and impossible to control by the spectrum of the
reality that one day habited the space giving sense to it.

Is a school still a school even though its total unuse? What are the microphones of unexistent lecturers talking about? Why are the tables so ordenated if there is nobody to feed? It seems that some of the elements introduced in the photograph by the artist herself are talking about those spectrum, about the strangeness of an empty place, abandoned. This effect is made clearar by the difficulty to distinguish what is real and what is manipulation.

It is a dialectical game between the essences and appearance. The tension between what is, what was and what it seems to be, solves finally in the conclusion that things happen because we make them happen. What we get from those spaces, which are being and also were, is the question that Concha is presenting now, closed by a high technical ability and a remarkable sense of framing, an absolute control of the space perception.