La fortaleza

“La fortaleza” is an artistic project that focuses on the human need to construct buildings for protection and territorial management, exerting control over space and acquiring power to influence the historical development of a place. In this sense, the project plays with the possibility of being understood through the combination of the inherent meanings of the word “fortress”: the construction itself (castles, walls, etc.) and human capacity.

History, fiction, and place are variables upon which this work is built. The place is related to the empirical and tangible elements of the world, history pertains to the meaning of those elements, and fiction represents a personal desire, a hypothesis, a conclusion that I would like to reach.

Using a collection of 144 trading cards featuring Spanish castles from 1957, an intervention is made on each card by erasing the building and adding the necessary landscape material to make the territory that serves as the castle’s foundation the protagonist.

The modified card is juxtaposed with a brief historical description on the reverse side, providing context to the erased castle and creating a sense of estrangement between the image and the text.