Juan Manuel Castro Prieto — Solovki

Centro de Arte Alcobendas
Calle de Mariano Sebastian Izuel, n°9 – 28100 Alcobendas, Madrid, Spain
From the 22th of May to the 24^th of August 2019

Within the scope of PHotoESPAÑA Festival, Juan Manuel Castro Prieto and Rafael Trapiello present the exhibition Solovki, from May 22 to August 24, at the Centro de Arte Alcobendas.

Solovki is the main island of the Solovetsky archipelago (Russia), located in the middle of the White Sea, known as such because it is frozen over for nearly half the year. Solovki was the mother Gulag, the terrible Soviet penitentiary system of forced labor camps. Active from 1924 to 1939, it served as a model for all the subsequent prisons.
Places have memory, and while one could only hope to bury this tragic past, the memory is imprinted in the lives of its inhabitants; it is impossible to escape it. The fact that Solovki is an island in the middle of the White Sea accentuates the memory of the prison in the collective sub-conscience.
Juan Manuel Castro Prieto and Rafael Trapiello have explored this territory observing the relationship between inferno and paradise. Using a narrative strategy alike to poetry, all the images have an unsettling tension that exists between the beauty and spirituality of the place and the terrible past that occurred on these islands.