Angel de la Rubia

My background is documentary photography. Thus, a departure point to my artwork is understanding this mean of representation in a way in which, following the classic semiotic cataloguing of the sign, the index is privileged above the icon and the symbol.

This perspective pictures the world as a compound of places inhabited by traces; human traces that remain (or vanish) in time passing and, by substitution, contiguity and repetition, can spread and therefore be read. This line of thought articulates the common themes to all my projects: the individual facing a social and chronological frame; the subject disappearing behind knowledge and utilitarian structures; the forgetting of the self in the eschatological processes of history. My main subjects (the decomposition of national identity through war, the construction of reality through language and media, my own family story within the context of Spanish history) belong together in that general purpose of my work. I explore genealogy as a intermediate path between history and memory, as a way to finding incarnation to the incessant flow of the hours; something that will allow the self remember him or herself, find a recurrent yet dynamic identity, and be able to turn a presence of the past into a possibility of a future.