Cristina R. Vecino defines herself as an adaptation between catastrophes. In my opinion, she assists beings (alive or not) from the destruction without even noticing. She recomposes them. She reviews them. Shee organizes them. She looks at them again. And despite that, she still considers that "what is not seen is always more important". It's like if everything acquired a special magnitude when photographed by her, without the need of the least ostentation.
No, the spectacularity is not always necessary in order to leave a mark, or saturated landscapes to feel its color.
When I ask her for the moment she made that photo, she confesses that she doesn't remember the city. I love it when people forget things because I realize that it doesn't just happen to me. It turns out that forgetfulness is an important part of my life, as it is of the work of Cristina. "Oblivion invents," she says. But the memory invents even more. We always reconstruct it according to the taste they left us, and these tastes don't stop transforming themselves. Reminiscence is, therefore, more distorted than neglect: forget, however, is more sincere when it is greater.
Her dialogue with María Tinaut more than a year ago was actually alluding to a similar idea in the Valladolid gallery Javier Silva (where she recently closed her solo exhibition "Anegar"): how memories are built and how the saved image determines his reinterpretation, consolidating a perception that may or may not have to do with reality. On these same concerns Cristina is planning her next exhibition in Patio Herreriano, curated by Ana Moyano, together with photographers Victor Hugo Martín Caballero and Ricardo Suárez. As she describes, it consists of "raising each of us a look on a found photograph, being able to develop not just a story but rather a fiction on what that image suggests to each one. Coinciding or not is the least important, what matters it's to see what happens and how each one develops a project based on a representation."
How difficult it is to choose. And as my friend Ela says, even not choosing is also a decision. The care of the selection, the revision and the coupling of some pieces with others deserves special attention when talking about the work of an artist who gives as much room to the left as to the chosen, to the context as to what is extracted from it. On her website there is a whole section devoted to the discarded images of the "Anegar" exhibition. For this reason I also wanted to share in this post the two images that until the last moment were about to be printed on 24 m².
One of the major projects in which Cristina is involved is the photography studio El Carrusel, in Valladolid. A special corner that fills Santo Domingo de Guzmán street with light and that last December turned four years old. It's a gallery that combines the work of curating exhibitions with the personal research of both Cristina R. Vecino and Ricardo Suárez, while developing professional reports on request. As a celebration, you can currently see the works of artists who have collaborated with the gallery throughout its four years, such as Miriam Chacón, Gonzalo de Miguel or Ana Cubero, an artist and textile designer that follows Cristina on our Ocho por Tres billboard and of which I will be writing soon.