Jorge Concha - Portfolio - Lo que permanece (What remains)

Lo que Permanece (What remains)

In 2006, I first arrived in the villages of Rondón and Zetaquira, in the mountains of Boyacá, Colombia. The road leading there was long and rough: large stretches of unpaved road, mud, rocks and steep inclines that made the journey itself a form of isolation. There I encountered a community sustained by proximity, by a culture and traditions passed down through generations, rooted in trust and human relationships that ran through the villages, from their people to their architecture. It was a territory that seemed to exist outside the pace of the rest of the country, with a particular magnetism that I still cannot explain.

These villages became part of my life because part of my family settled there. I kept returning and observing their transformations, almost in a documentary way. In 2015, I decided to take a camera loaded with expired black-and-white analogue film, which had also been exposed to airport X-rays, without knowing what effect this would have on the images.

The landscape recorded in these photographs changed until it almost disappeared, making the degradation of the film a parallel image of the disappearance and transformation of reality. What had been fixed on the negative through a chemical process lasting only seconds also began to disappear from reality: the houses, the roads, the silences, and a way of living protected by isolation. Changes in access and living conditions inevitably transformed the region’s social dynamics and landscapes. Far from concealing these landscapes, the alterations in the film seem to represent the way a territory fades from memory. What remains is not exactly the place, but the memory of what no longer exists.