La Cañada Real is a former livestock route located on the outskirts of Madrid which, over time, has evolved into an extensive informal settlement where very diverse communities and ways of life coexist. Across its different sectors, we find deeply rooted realities, but also situations of vulnerability, housing issues, social exclusion, and drug trafficking. Today, some of its sectors are threatened by processes of transformation and dismantling, raising questions about the future of both the territory and the stories that inhabit it.
During my residency at GlogauAIR, I have sought to place my practice within a direct relationship with this territory and to emphasise the importance of fieldwork. My project emerges from walking through La Cañada, observing its spaces, and engaging with a landscape in constant transformation. Rather than representing the people who live there, I am interested in observing the traces that their ways of life have left on the territory.
The project I present is the result of this process of immersion: an archive of images built through my walks across La Cañada Real. Through photography, I document spaces, structures, objects, textures, and situations that reveal a landscape that is both decaying and beautiful, marked by traces and contradictions. The images occupy a moment of uncertainty in which it is difficult to know whether we are witnessing the end of a story or the beginning of another transformation of the territory.
These images do not function merely as documentation of the process; they constitute the artistic project itself.
This project is about looking at what remains as a territory begins to disappear.