From photographs inspired by Spain’s emerging trap and drill music scenes to the painterly images of a Ukrainian rocket-scientist-turned-photographer, see a trio of highlights from PHotoESPAÑA 2024
With 84 exhibitions and 293 artists, this year’s PHotoESPAÑA extends into all corners of Madrid: there are shows in neo-baroque palaces and repurposed ironworks, in a vertiginous water tower and amid the capital’s lush botanical gardens. With a theme of “perpetual motion”, the festival spans from international names to anonymous discoveries – from a panoramic sample of the late Erwin Olaf’s career in a subterranean centre beneath the fountains of Plaza Colón, to photographer David Trullo’s unearthing of an illicit trove of homemade erotica from the 1930s, taken by a high-society Madrid couple who mysteriously disappeared. There’s a collection of African and Middle Eastern photographers circling themes of exodus and migration; and the convention-defying Consuelo Kanaga, a photographer who died virtually unknown but whose powerful portraits of African-American lives across the US are being newly reappraised. We chose three highlights from the multitude of voices brought together for the next era of PHotoESPAÑA – its first under new director Maria Santoyo.
Widline Cadet: Take this with you
Young Haiti-born, LA-based photographer Widline Cadet couldn’t come to the Madrid opening of her exhibition Take this with you; despite living in the US since she was ten, she still doesn’t have a Greencard. It’s an absence that’s also conjured in her work – the early absence of her mother, who left Haiti to work in New York when she was a baby, and today, the absence across the ocean of the homeland to which Cadet can’t return. “It’s a dance between where you’re from and where you’re going,” says Désirée Kroep, the exhibition’s curator, introducing the photographer’s haunting work at the Casa de America, a 19th century palace close to El Retiro park.
Untangling the parts of herself and her history she no longer has access to, Cadet peppers the gallery with memories: framed family photographs on a mantelpiece, footage from the celebratory, Haitian funeral of a grandmother she never met, even her former living room and its floral, plastic-covered sofa and gauzy curtains, recreated in one corner. The result is a dreamlike family archive of her own that is suffused with a deep, yearning ache – but also isn’t quite what it seems. The little glitch of an extra, unaccounted for pair of limbs or the strangers on the street that she reimagines as doppelgangers or siblings all act as a reminder of the slippery nature of memory.
Take this with you is at House of America in Madrid, as part of PHotoESPAÑA, until September 7.
Widline Cadet: Take this with youCourtesy of the artist, © Widline CadetWidline Cadet: Take this with youCourtesy of the artist, © Widline Cadet
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