Alma Tierra, 2019
“Even though it only appears explicitly in some of the photographs, in almost all of them we perceive the presence of the sign we’ve been seeing for years on our travels to so-called empty Spain and that sums up the message of this work by José Manuel Navia: FOR SALE. Everything is for sale: houses, land, horizons, even the souls of villages whose residents abandoned them in search of a better, or at least a less lonely, life.
While urban and peripheral Spain grows disproportionately, inland and rural Spain are suffering in extremes that would surprise even Spaniards if, besides speaking of depopulation and abandonment as they often do of late, they decided to check the extension and importance of both phenomena for themselves.”
Julio Llamazares