Santiago Díaz Escamilla

A Second or Repeated Visit (People After Other People)

2016

Digital print on photographic paper; Digital drawing transferred on the wall; Manually pulverized stone collected from different locations in the Nansa Valley (Cantabria, Spain)

I collect particles. 
I connect temporal links by breaking, grinding pieces, and turning them into a homogeneous mixture, a condensed body of interconnections.

In the Cantabrian region of northern Spain, after gathering stones from various places throughout the Nansa Valley and visiting two caves containing Paleolithic art dating back approximately 12,000 years, I look for possible ways of thinking about human evolution in terms of our relationship with the Earth.

What stories do we tell when we use the word nature? Are we tracing the same lines that past generations did before us?

Are we looking at and living in a fragment of the world that only constitutes a small part of an extensive system that is constantly developing? What do we mean when we call a territory a landscape? What does this so-called land think of such a denomination?

This work is composed of three parts: The stones of different sources, which I have manually crushed with the help of a hammer for several days until a fine and homogeneous powder forms. The latter is predominantly reddish due to the high presence of red slate in the mixture.
On the other hand, two large-format copies of the same photograph. The image was shot in a local forest and edited in two different ways, turning it into a blurred fragment. Finally, a digitally modeled stratigraphic diagram arranged in superimposed layers transferred to the wall.