Marta Sentís’ photographs are a statement of her independence and, at the same time, a mirror of herself, of her interest in others’ models of life, of her search for scenarios and people who break her away from the social references in which she grew up. She spent her childhood in Paris, Barcelona, Oxford and Florence, and then left to work for several years in New York, in particular in the artistic scene in SoHo, the neighbourhood where she lived. Upon her return to Barcelona, she got involved with others who, like her, rebelled against domestication and she played a leading role in the underground, an anarchist and counterculture movement in the late seventies.
During those years, she began travelling around the world producing features and documenting United Nations projects. She gradually started choosing the places she visited and staying for a longer time in each one, living with people whose intense relationship with life was on the margins of Western notions of economic well-being and consumption; people who, as she tends to point out, ‘have time’.
Her photographs increasingly reveal the deep connections she created with different social groups and her strong desire to belong; therefore, she eschews the mystification of the exotic and focuses on the cultural mix that exists on every continent. Her travels do not emulate the search for a lost paradise, nor the utopia of happiness associated with primitivism. This disaffection with the textures of the exotic becomes an alternative iconography, unequalled in Spanish photography of the time, which casts aside the sublimations of black and white and instead uses vibrant colours that invite the audience to share synaesthetic experiences. Her whole work is a visual imaginary narrated first-hand, which emphatically affirms her vocation for freedom, her desire to own her days and her life.
Exhibition curated by Alejandro Castellote.
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