Cuenca in the gaze, 2014
Over one winter, Navia has travelled across the rough landscapes of the Spanish province of Castilla-La Mancha, country of Don Quichotte where epochs cohabit and genrations get mixed up. An old ladies lives in a former grocery where everything has be preserved. A monastery converted into a boarding school maintains several centuries of religiosity. Abandoned hamlets and old town where figures are wandering form vestiges of a passed away rurality buried under a snowy shroud in dissiminated and forsaken cemeteries.
Navia’s nag is no more a poor horse but the showy train of modern Spain, equally incongruous on these lands where the inertia of memory has triumphed.
Through the panes could be seen closed down train stations fading away among the frosty stones of cold and asleep valleys. During each stop, busyness is insilling a frail life that is vanishing just after, giving way to a sepulchral silence.
As an archeologist of recollection, Navia has dug up the sweet delicacy of a fixed universe where traces of inimacy are struggling against the embalming of time.
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