"This is a project that deals, in a somewhat chaotic and fragmented way, with the connection between time, memory and place (or, if you prefer, between photography/cinema, literature and city); a project that seeks to understand in what way spaces mark time and are linked to the memory of the place. And this through the coexistence of images and texts, through the desire for both to be able to feed back and coexist in parallel so that, as W. G. Sebald writes, "writing reconstructs the visual image and the visual image deconstructs the text." Therefore, this project is an accumulation of places (literary, filmic and spatial), more or less close to, more or less disconnected from, each other, which come to call attention to the fragmentation of human experience, the incapacity to understand the social whole and the imperfection of knowledge. Here a set of "stories" are brought together which refer to anodyne places and to solitary or uprooted beings; "stories", above all of those who do not find "their place" regardless of how much they travel, walk or search, or how much they dream, relive or experience. Here we talk about some of these spaces and some of these people, we read fragments of their texts, we view stills or look at photographs of individuals who go in search of "something" without knowing very well what it is and of places that we do not know very well where they are. In short, this project seeks to talk about some of these people who feel like foreigners in any place and of those places which almost nobody mentions.

This project shall be understood within a permanent process of economic globalisation and informational revolution that makes it possible for the planet to tend, very quickly, towards a generalised urbanisation (articulated territorially around networks of cities) which will radically modify its spatial and social structure. In this sense, and as the philosopher Paul Virilio pointed out, architecture is an instrument of measurement, a sum of knowledge which can, by measuring us with the natural environment, organise the space and time of societies. Therefore, the previous concepts and visions have ceased to be valid when analysing the surrounding reality; today we should expand our architectural approaches and understand the urban space, not only that brought about by the material and concrete effect of the structures built but also all those aspects that affect, with the awareness of time and distances, the perception of the environment. From this point of view, we can assert that the cities have ceased to be stable places, or a clearly determined form or a coherent movement, to become spaces of complex structures where mobility and mutation (subject to constant collisions) are some of their most significant features. We can say that the cities are becoming enormous urban concentrations, metropolises, which are assigned not only to a territory, but to a complex set of economic and social relations that demand new approaches.

The project is conveyed through the intense and porous relationship between photography, architecture and literature, or between time, place and memory. It is all designed (and organised) as if it were a book of stories. Structured like a loop that opens and closes on itself and in which the visual arts, narrative and films interrelate with each other fluently and vibratingly. The project comprises five spaces or halls that bring together different visual, cinematographic and literary works. The structure of the project is made up of a prologue, three chapters and an epilogue."

José Miguel G. Cortés
Exhibition's curator