Violeta Cañigueral Casassas
The project Echoes of the Imaginary (2018 – today) consists of a series of portraits made in an improvised studio, at home, where I create characters from other worlds and other times. What in a way started at random and as fun, has become a conscious process of immersion in the mental universe itself. The goal is not to tell specific stories, but to suggest and evoke; let emerge, through characterizations and scenarios, all those artistic and literary references that since childhood have been shaping my symbolic imagination. However, I do not intend this to be a path of analysis and deconstruction, but simply of liberation. The intention is to dedicate a space so that all those ideas, needs and visions that I carry are trapped and need to leave, without judging them.
The protagonists of the portraits are people from my immediate environment – family and friends. Far from the patterns of beauty and stereotyped attitudes that prevail in most visual media today, in this work I want to show how ordinary people, flesh and blood, stand up in characters with more strength and character than many of those perfectly studied faces, almost plastic, hollow. The idea is not to offer a faithful portrait of the person as she is, but to transport her to another reality, giving her an identity different from her own, without losing it, but her own essence. Everyone has a light and it inspires me in a certain direction, not everything is for everyone. The result is portraits in which the energy of the wearer and my inner world come together to give rise to these echoes of the imaginary.
Who I am? You could say I grew up between paintings and stories, drawings and games. In college, my curiosity sparked my interest in history and later in East Asian and Chinese Studies. During a stay in California I was reunited with the visual arts, and a giant leap took me to China, where I lived for three years, between scholarships, language classes and bowling on stage and circuses with a troupe of Belarusian girls. Throughout this journey, I defined my interest in visual language and, in particular, in photography, both as a documentary source and as a means of expression. A master’s degree in England makes me think about the interpretation of photographic practices and how to approach them, from east to west and vice versa. Back home, I expand this knowledge in the field of management, preservation and dissemination of photographic heritage. In short, photography, whether through research, conservation or creation, is the path I have taken to relate to the world.