"It was winter in Berlin: A light
with no light, a sky without sky.
The air white as a loaf of wet bread"

(“Horses”. Extravagario. Pablo Neruda)

‘Morir en Berlín’ (Die in Berlin) is a project composed of 30 photographs. This work is presented under a double reading: a human portrait of the current Berlin and, in parallel, an exploration of aspects such as rebirth and death, understood as a life cycle.

This work is linked to the different series of photographs and videos that I have made over the last four years: 'Sobre vacio' / 2009, 'La herida' / 2008 and 'Emotions' / 2006-07, which explore feelings, the complexity of emotions, passion, pain, loneliness ...
'Morir en Berlín' was born from a personal experience: the sudden death of my brother in January 2010, when I was in Berlin. A month later I started working on the project. On a personal level, this represents the desire to transform the feeling of sadness and emptiness that has invaded me into something beautiful.
Berlín is a city of contrasts, vibrant, where coexist its latent dramatic past and an effervescence that I would describe as 'nourishing'.

I proposed the series as a contemporary portrait, a human chronicle through Berlin multiplicity and plurality: artists, musicians, waiters, anonymous that I request in the street ... This is the reason for the importance of the portraits being numerous and varied.
They are portraits in the classical sense, the binomial "representation-identity". When I propose to people their participation, I ask them literally to represent their own death through their stripped body. If they wish, they can pose with an important object for them. After having photographed them, I rework the portraits, burying them under the ice of the Spree, where I made hundreds of photos while it was frozen.

The strong contrast of the seasons in Berlin, snowy for months and the sudden explosion of spring, make the German romantic spirit present in its supremacy of feeling ... tumultuous, melancholy, desperate ...
The icy portraits (the photographs are called all 'Lágrimas heladas' / 'Frozen Tears') play with the double idea of 'permanence-absence'. Death is a universal subject as much as love, life and death are intimately linked. The staging of the bodies under the ice of the river works as a metaphor: trapped in the river. The river as a representation of life, constantly moving, but paralyzed - since frozen/dead during the winter, waiting for the spring in which the life cycle is reborn again.

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