My father was diagnosed with Coronavirus on the 27th March. He was taken to the hospital, without ceremony or farewell, and died on the 31st March. He died in my hometown of Aranda de Duero, in Northern Spain, thousands of miles from Glasgow, in a global pandemic. An unbridgeable distance separating two bodies that once were the same flesh. Grieving in lockdown, I’ve been trying to approximate the unattainable physical connection with my family via the medium of a laptop screen, from this lockdown that we are living in, through an ethereal connection from my cubicle to their cubicle.
I am now the main character of my own dystopian fiction. I’m obliged to remain physically distant from my father’s farewell. In order to be able to say goodbye to my father, I started to create a tale. A visual chronicle from the cubicle that I’m inhabiting at the moment, a space that has become an extension of my body. From his photo archive, the images that he created in life, I’m creating my own images. I’m having an intimate conversation with him, where I express my grief and my pain for a farewell denied us. I’m introducing motion in the images, as an effort to “awake the soul”, and give life to our conversations.
This visual conversation with my father will continue until the day that my family and I can finally reunite. It’s a visual essay on the ephemeral, and the transitory state of life.
