Juan Fabuel

The Mediterranean Sea has always been connected with the idea of cultural origin, trade, movement and tourism. As an essential setting for human development, this region was one of the most inhabited places. 14.24 is inspired by the idea of temporary lapse, origin, destination and notion of journey. But how could I turn a space into a site and vice versa? By playing with the absence or presence of light and taking the migratory movements as a reference. The project focuses on the ideas of perception, construction and notion of space and site through a series of images showing different landscapes of Mediterranean coast areas lit up by the moonlight. In the moonlight, these places are turned into unknown spaces with no clear anchoring points. For people arriving, however, these unknown spaces contain the ability to mutate and become places where to settle, in order to draw a vital story and develop new identity silhouettes. In this case, photography is a medium with the ability to provide new contexts, reflecting the oneiric element of a desire for search, risk and metamorphosis, always implicit in every journey. Different points of the Mediterranean peninsular coast, the Canary Islands, Italy and Greece have been photographed since 2009. Nowadays, the migratory flows respond to causes which are more violent than the desire to get into unexplored land and find new settlements for the human race. I suggest a landscape where the picture boundaries fade away, a landscape which acts as a witness of time in multiple dimensions —climatological and luminous, systemic and political. Conceived as an opportunity and as a space open to the journey, it is a landscape which goes beyond vision conveying it a meaning; especially in the last years, particularly tragic when we have been witnesses of the decay of the structures which were the foundations of the idea of a Europe which appeared to be solid. 14.24 is the distance in kilometers between Africa and Europe.