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About Selu Herraiz
text by the curator Elena Azzedin

“An attempt to make career as a photographer that turned into a journey under the skin”

Soon after getting his degree in Communications engineering, Selu Herraiz started experimenting with photography. He got deep into learning the technique by collectively developing an analog photographic lab. He found in the lab the metaphors of the physics and the chemistry: the unexpected, the error and multiple interpretations of one shot,

The photography became a device for capturing life, the apparatus that works like memory, choosing a fragment of reality and leaving the rest outside, in the oblivion.
If the aim is to create memory — the calculation, the focus, the tripod, the selection doesn't make sense. He searched for the total honesty: no editing, hundreds of pictures were shown in the exhibitions, clustered moments of life, youth, travels, sentences written in the streets, invisible corners.

The more he controlled the tool, the more unable he was to express what an instant contains. The gallery, also, was not the place to relocate these fragment of memory anymore. He started adding text to the photos, printing them large and placing them on the street.

Selu developed different, in some ways opposite, working paths: on the one hand capturing the intimate and the insignificant, with small format analog photography, and on the other hand subverting publicity strategies using poster-art to fill up the streets with poetry.

After seven years of intense work he created “El diario de lo que No”. A photography book without a single picture, where the images, the intimate and the social were expressed through words. That was the end of a period and the ultimate exercise in photography.

Since 2013 he is not interested in capturing memory but in creating it. Performace as  a suspended time was a very wide space for creating, there he can experiment with sound, body, space and time. He got involved in different performance and dance companies which work beyond the stage, working in different public spaces, beyond the normative bodies, dancing amongst the people with disabilities, and beyond music, creating experimental soundscapes.

Currently, he is interested in understanding the meaning of ritual in contemporary times, the spaces in-between the conscious and the unconscious, the science and the magic, the ancient wisdom and the current knowledge. He explores these issues not only through the already existent and wide theory on the the topic, but also by creating experiences where bodies, sounds, and objects blend symbolic worlds and create possibilities for new ways to re-imagine current state of humans and their evolution.