There are forms of absence that precede death.

This work takes as its starting point one of them: the emotional block faced when confronted with decline and the impossibility of truly being present with someone who was already saying goodbye.

My father first lost his voice, then his ability to move, then his breath.

I was never able to ask him how he was feeling.

The notes he left behind form the core of this work. In them linger fear, hope, exhaustion and bewilderment. What I did not ask, he wrote down. These texts engage with the spaces of his final years, the family archive and the landscapes of Asturias, the place to which he longed to return as his world shrank. Between writing and image, a fragmentary narrative emerges, a belated attempt at reconciliation.

The silence was not just that of the illness. It was also the silence I maintained.

–

Artwork included in the exhibition “Interdependencias”, Official Section of PHotoESPAÑA.