Our daily life passes through places to which we hardly pay attention. Spaces that are nothing today but that, in their empty desolation, preserve the signs of absence and the emotional charge of experiences that have been numb or buried in memory. For more than three decades, the duo formed by María Bleda (Castellón, 1976) and José María Rosa (Albacete, 1970), winner of the National Photography Prize, have searched for semi-abandoned soccer fields, vacant lots that were once the scene of battles, architecture conceived as centers of power or the archaeological enclaves where the origin of man is located.... They do so not only “to record the traces of a past that has been sedimenting in the territory, but above all to make visible latent memories that are not especially visible that allow us to contemplate what we have not yet imagined and to reflect on the musealization processes of the past”, explains Marta Dahó, curator of the stimulating retrospective dedicated to them by the KBr center of the Mapfre Foundation.
Bleda y Rosa , co-produced with the ICO Museum in Madrid, where it will be presented later, is the first exhibition that brings together the entire work of the pair of photographers, since their first series Campos de Fútbol , begun in 1992 when they were still students they were interested in some spaces that were disappearing and that in some way had formed part of their childhood, until the most recent, such as Prontuario (2010-2017), images of scenes from the Atlantic revolutions in which the text acquires a great protagonism displaying new readings and narratives. The series are presented in the form of a large video installation in which the projected images intertwine ideas, creating unexpected associations and complex plots between them.
Bleda and Rosa are one of the great references of contemporary Spanish photography. In their landscapes, beautiful or bland, there is never anyone and yet they have the ability to activate what was once there. The echoes of the clashes, the pain and the blood spilled in Roncesvalles, Numancia, Navas de Tolosa, Calatañazor, Bailén, Sagunto, Villalar de los Comuneros... (Battlefields) or the monumental spaces that one day the Iberians, Celts built , Greeks, Romans, Islamic and Phoenicians in their settlements in the Iberian Peninsula, today reduced to archaeological ruins. The past that becomes present and opens a question about the legacy that these cultures have left in our behaviors and ways of being.
The artists, who say they have found a joint way of working in which "we have turned the camera into something that is not individual", work in series that extend geographically and temporarily for years, some of which are still open. This is the case of Origins , started in 2003, which walks through the places where man took his first steps or Corporations , in which they have been working since 2006, on how large companies relate to their architectures. The exhibition also brings together the works belonging to the Memoriales series, on the monumentalization of history and the juxtaposition of the traces of the past in the new urban fabrics of Berlin, Washington and Jerusalem, or Estancias, in which they illuminate the layers of life and ideology that survive semi-hidden in ancient palaces or stately villas or monumental cities.
