Cells (2013)

 

While working on the film Offering, about a Matador, I visited many Bullfight arenas located in

the Andalusia region of Spain. While wandering around the back areas of these arenas, I came

across the small cells where the bulls are kept prior to fights. I was moved and provoked by the

architecture of these dark, dilapidated and confined spaces, which over many years had become heavily marked and scratched by the distressed animals penned inside them.

 

In this series of large scale, almost abstract, photographs taken at a very high resolution, I have attempted to detach the cells from their specific context, emphasizing the surface qualities, the marks that preserve the memories of many anonymous protagonists. Although reminiscent of minimalism and action painting, these photographs are in essence indexical, documents of existential struggles, a fusion of living bodies with decaying stone, monuments to the unnamed and unmourned.