Reflections on our own identity, the weight of education in our way of growing up and seeing the world, the questioning of romantic love and the effects of geopolitics in cities are some of the main themes that are addressed in the work of these young photography talents, gathered at the KBr Fundación MAPFRE in a new edition of the KBr Flama project. This project is an initiative of Fundación MAPFRE and the main photography schools in Barcelona aimed at giving projection to the work of the students who each year finish their photography studies and face the challenge of a professional dedication to photography.
Alan Balzac, Rocío Madrid and Lucía Morón, three photographers born in the eighties, and Ivette Blaya, only 23 years old, have been chosen to be part of the third edition of KBr Flama. Until next January 28, the public can enjoy the work of the winners of this call to which, since 2021, students from the four educational institutions that promote, together with Fundación MAPFRE, this project: IEFC Instituto de Photographic Studies of Catalonia; Grisart International School of Photography; Idep Barcelona - Higher School of Art and Design and ELISAVA Faculty of Design and Engineering of Barcelona.
The work exhibited by the four demonstrates a unique sensitivity and perspective that has been valued by a jury made up of Mónica Allende, artistic director of the GetxoPhoto Festival; David Armengol, director of La Capella in Barcelona; Irene de Mendoza, artistic director of the Foto Colectania Foundation; and Anna Planas, artistic director of Paris Photo.
The exhibition tour begins with the work of Alan Balzac (Galicia, 1989), who invites us to reflect on the identity of the human being, his search and the discovery and his own destruction. The Death of Identity is a theoretical and visual essay that is based on his own experience, from his childhood experiences with his twin brother to the deconstruction of his current adult body. Last year, this Galician creator self-published an essay that analyzed the effects that an identity imposed according to sex, gender, class or race can have on the definition of oneself.
Bonsai as a metaphor for social domination. Ivette Blaya (Santa Margarida de Montbui, 2000) explores, with the photographs of Simply Cutting, the mechanisms of said domination based on these suggestive trees to which her father dedicated so many hours when she was a child. The domestication process that is carried out on the tree to turn it into a bonsai—modeled, pruned and forcibly placed in a pot to prevent its natural growth—is presented as an incessant process of education and correction, as well as a vigilant gaze exercised. from inherited moral judgments.
With a more photojournalistic and less introspective spirit, Rocío Madrid (Melilla, 1988) dedicates her project to her own city, where she continues to reside. The young photographer has turned into images the circumstances that involved the closure of Melilla due to the pandemic, when the passage of people and goods on both sides of the border was blocked. The recession generated by that blockade affected both the local and floating populations and gave rise to some extreme actions, such as jumping over the fence that ended up becoming normal. Melilla is a documentary photography project that narrates this change in the geopolitical chessboard from within.
The exhibition ends with I love you. Neither do I., a project by Lucía Morón (Buenos Aires, 1984) that investigates those social, cultural and family mandates that many women carry around love and marriage. It is the result of a conversation that the author has with her family through photographs of her wedding and a series of self-portraits. But the author does not limit herself to collecting photographs from family albums, but she manipulates them, trying to rewrite another story about the ways of loving and projecting desire. Some of the images escape the frames, celebrating an attempt to break, or at least question, the paradigm of romantic love.
The public who wants to go to the KBr Fundación MAPFRE to see KBr Flama'23 can complete their visit with the extensive retrospective that is presented of one of the great names in contemporary photography: William Eggleston.
