In the Same Footsteps is the name chosen by artist Gregori Iglesias (Les Borges Blanques, 1966) and photographer Sabela Eiriz (Lugo, 1991) for this exhibition resulting from their collaboration.
Traveling to Germany and Poland between 2016 and 2018 to visit some of the best known concentration camps (Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and Buchenwald) gave rise to this artistic project consisting of pictorial work by Gregori Iglesias and photographs by Sabela Eiriz.
Gregori studied fine arts in Lleida, has lived in several countries and has travelled everywhere, experiences which have made him an artist with considerable international visibility. His work is characterized by offering a very pronounced gesturality and by a chromatic simplicity, usually dominated by sgraffitoed blacks and whites in a style that is both figurative and abstract.
As for Sabela, she studied audiovisual communication at the University of Santiago de Compostela and has a master’s degree in Photography and Design from Elisava and a master’s degree in Comparative Studies of Literature, Art and Thought from Pompeu Fabra University, both in Barcelona. Photography and video creation are her two most developed areas, although her creations are also enriched by other media like writing.
The trip
Walking on the land they were visiting, seeing, looking carefully, listening and smelling, the two artists let themselves be carried away by what drew them in—sensations at first rather unaccommodating and unpleasant. Walking the paths, the same ones previously walked by the cold, bare and skeletal feet of those who suffered unjustly and in the name of the current victims of human barbarity, they felt beyond what they could grasp.
Reflections
Settled into in this cold and now distant context, they reflected on the human condition, walking slowly, thinking, conversing, asking themselves why the world doesn’t work well, why history is marked by blood and suffering and not just by what is simplest, love, the elixir that makes us all feel so good.
Why do we not avoid discomforting those to come? They are not to blame for what the current generations do.
Power, avarice, madness, suffering, incongruence, fear, ambition, confusion, complexity... Why have we, throughout our history, allowed ourselves to be dragged along by the tentacles of evil, causing so much pain and suffering? Why do we resist existing as truly free and happy beings?