Isn't it curious that civilizations start to rot, not from their heads, but
from their hearts?

Aimé Césaire,Discourse on Colonialism.

NATURA is a compilation of landscapes, décors, paintings, mythology and buildings from dreaminess. Portraits of places that retain time; the past and the future suspended in these sort of time machines.

The past and the future. The future that we're all living in and the permanence of the past. The battle against the sense of non-future. The aim of finding ourselves.

This is a tiny piece of human History, a small fragment of one episode of humankind. This is about the will of hoarding the whole world; the portrait of a once magnificent Europe that is now drowning. NATURA is about those ¨first discoveries¨, about geographical distribution and about the plundering of natural resources: collecting exotism, scientific studies and natural history disclosure.

Natura is a project that emphasises its gaze into zoo parks.

These parks represent the failure of a perception built in a civilising project that failed as well. Through visiting zoo parks we can travel to the past, walk through the path of an identity from which we understand the future as a dystopian refugee, where we can hide from ourselves and from our own history.

Our ambiguous relation with savage and exotic beings can be observed through these devices that reproduce nature. A relation that was created from both repulsion and attraction; fascination and dislike. Those savage beings incarnate the contradiction between life and death: a caged existence.

In this project, the dialogue between photography and Buffon´s illustrations is a form of questioning the builted representations of nature. The zoo scenery makes animals become ghosts of nature, illusions of what once was wild. Life becomes just a setting, a representation in a natural history text book.

In a certain way, zoo parks are ruins of our times, they are active vestiges, remnants of an era that seems to be condemned to disappear and where exclaiming the dangers of destroying nature makes us aware of human finitudness.