The second publication by Lúa Ribeira (As Pontes, Galicia, 1986), was born as a closure and, at the same time, as an escape point. What began among the rhythms and echoes of the emerging Spanish music scene trap and the drill – it was first exhibited at the ICP in New York, then at the Lázaro Galdiano and now at the C/O in Berlin – it grew as it was exhibited and transformed as it breathed in public. The project was refined formally and conceptually until it was condensed into a light book of pages, as large and thin as a story, but full of questions: Agony in the garden.
The photographer thus places herself on more ambiguous terrain where she claims to feel more at ease. His interest in marginalized communities and mechanisms of oppression focuses this time on counterculture, from an approach that transcends music, observing the signs and languages of contemporary youth movements that express the alienation and uncertainty that surround our time. “I was interested in the expressive and natural response of the generation following mine. They lived in an environment of permanent crisis: climate emergencies, economic instability, pandemic and migration crises”, says the photographer, a full member of the Magnum Agency since 2023.
The photographs were taken between 2021 and 2023, around Madrid, Málaga, Granada and Almería. Nonetheless, they allude to a global territory through the poses and attitudes of the protagonists. His portraits are interspersed with landscapes that introduce moments of silence. Places of barren land, bushes that survive dust, plastic waste and debris, where uncertainty ends and begins. “I grew up playing in open fields, in those fields that were a bit of a no-man’s land,” says Ribeira. “Now everything is fenced off, but the truth is that some images were taken in places that are in the center of the city.”
A disturbing atmosphere surrounds everything; In arid landscapes the sound resonates Prayer in the Garden of Gethsemanethe biblical passage that describes the period of acceptance of imminent suffering that precedes the arrest of Jesus, a prelude to the Passion, and which gives the monograph its title. “Both the southern landscape and the title helped me to frame my work, to distance myself from the illusion of the current and to try to get closer to what is most fundamental, to the universal,” says the photographer.
Some of the young portraits had already posed The lucky ones, one of his previous series. Others belonged to the local community or were in some way linked to music through the production of home videos or other types of publications that the photographer found online. This is how he met Pomelo, after accidentally discovering a clip of him singing. In one of the images the young woman takes some coins out of her pocket, a gesture that reminded Ribeira of Charon, the Greek gang boatman who was charging to cross the river. A gesture which, at the same time, functions as a symbol of the economic instability that weighs on a good part of his generation. There is also Alba, a trap dancer and musician, known as BITXSX. Pose doing a ahegao face —a Japanese term describing a facial expression of intense pleasure—, often used in hentai — a form of pornographic anime — as well as erotic video games and manga. “In this case, they have already brought that performative and theatrical part that I like so much to integrate into my work,” says the artist. “They are young people who are very used to expressing themselves through images in a very fresh way, they make video clips that break with the concept of amateur. All this captures me a lot, but the degree of collaboration depends on the connection that is generated between us.”
The photographer prefers to ignore the more contextual details of the shots to focus on gestures and postures, and avoid distances between the observer and who appears in the image. Thus expressions become a mirror of the human condition.
Religious symbolism is also present in the series. “They help to distance history from current events, although in this case the title is mainly responsible for this. I would say that in this case it refers to my admiration for religious art, for the representation of pain and suffering”, underlines the photographer.
Ribeira builds a space that is as provocative as it is poetic, where the sacred and the profane go hand in hand. In a context of perpetual crisis and accelerated cultural mutations, his images move through a dystopian atmosphere where some gestures border on the absurd, but not to disorientate, but rather to highlight what remains: the fragility, fear, betrayal, uncertainty and the desire for transcendence that accompany human existence. Among the rubble of the past and present, the work searches for a naked truth on the margins of the official world, where the ephemeral and the eternal meet.
Agony in the garden. Lua Ribeira. Dalpino. 64 pages. 50 euros.
