Artist Statement – Untitled (Alicante #227)
This image forms part of Confluences, a photographic series examining the subtle forces—political, economic, historical, and emotional—that converge in our urban environments. Taken in Alicante, the photograph captures a quiet yet visually charged sports court: faded lines for multiple games crisscross a pale blue surface, framed by a monolithic green wall under a cloudless sky.
At first glance, the scene feels serene, almost minimal. But it’s precisely the overlapping court markings that drew me in. Each set of lines obeys a different logic—a different game, a different rulebook. It became, for me, a quiet metaphor for how we move through the world: each of us guided by inherited systems, often invisible to others sharing the same space.
In Spain, this visual layering takes on added meaning. Though the Civil War ended in 1939 and Franco’s dictatorship fell in 1975, its legacy is still deeply embedded in public memory and physical space. The “Pact of Forgetting” left many historical wounds publicly unexamined, and contemporary Spanish society continues to navigate multiple, sometimes conflicting narratives of identity, justice, and belonging. The stark wall in the image might echo the authoritarian past; the restless, overlapping lines below suggest the multiplicity of voices now reclaiming space.
What looks like an empty recreational area becomes a palimpsest of history and lived experience—a confluence of silence, structure, and unresolved tension. This is the pulse of Confluences: to find meaning where stories overlap, where the surface is simple but the ground beneath is anything but.