DEMOTANASIA

My work as a photographer has as its main objective the exploration and knowledge of the environment for the achievement of an enrichment from a personal point of view. I am passionate about the photographic act and I use the camera to, through a conscious exploration of the world that surrounds me, influences me, and consequently concerns me, collect as a viewer my own subjective vision with the intention of recording and transmitting it through images. The channeling of my work through formal projects also allows me to enjoy the process of research and documentation that I try to complement with other artistic media such as literature, film or art, in order to expand my training, knowledge and vision of the particular subject on which I am working. I try that beyond an artistic purpose there is a parallel process of personal growth. On a personal level, I am more concerned about being a good father than an artist and I believe that the most valuable inheritance I can transmit to my own children is born from that knowledge of the world around us, its analysis, and the awareness of transmitting that which has true value and importance, something I enjoy doing through a camera. - The images I provide are part of a project under development on what is known as "demotanasia", which is nothing more than the gradual abandonment of the rural world. Galicia, the community where I live, has a historical tradition closely linked to the rural world, to the existence of a very dispersed population distribution and grouped in "parishes" which is a singular collective population entity with origin in the ancient territorial division of the Christian churches. For various reasons, in recent years hundreds of territories have been lost and abandoned in the most inland areas of the community, causing the disappearance of this traditional and cultural characteristic of the territory, as well as a particular way of life, linked to natural resources, land and water. In this project I try to document on the one hand how is the life of this generation, perhaps the last, living in rural Galicia, and on the other hand show the appearance of those places that have already been abandoned, places full of history, which are part of our identity as a people, which will be lost if not remedied.

A photographic work that poetically invests a question that is perhaps no longer a question, such as the abandonment of the rural world, with its times, codes, territorial partitions, signs, and uses of reference. Galicia is an autonomous community that stands in the north-western apex of the Iberian Peninsula; scratched by the harsh winds of the Atlantic. A finis terrae, a possible destination for pilgrimages. Indeed here, Christian history intertwines with strong natures, paths, woods, trees, places that preserve alchemy, memories, and ancient traditions. Of course, that land studded with churches, sparse communities, and modest solidarity typical of peasant civilization is threatened by modernity, by the progress that snatches children from the countryside to lead them to the city. Which empties, deprives, takes away to accumulate, amass elsewhere. Those of Vicente Fraga Fernandez are romantic notes, a blurred memory, fragile glances, atmospheres like crumbs of a vanishing past. The title of the ongoing project, "Demotanasia," indicates a process that leads to the disappearance of the population from a territory due to political actions or omissions. The author also wonders about his identity as a father, a quest for responsibility again. His photographs attest to an authentic will and a cultural intention which is already a form of resistance to oblivion.