Collective exhibition presented at the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome as part of the X International Photography Festival of Rome, Italy.

The photographers Sergi Cámara, Héctor Mediavilla, Alfonso Moral and Fernando Moleres, of the Pandora Photographic Collective, approach the notion of “Motherland” from a documentary perspective, but one understood not as a mirror reflecting memory, not as a copy of the world but as a medium capable of constructing its own referents. In this way it gives us the possibility to develop a discourse on the world, recreating it and endowing it with other meanings.

We have observed three central themes that recur throughout their photographic work. The first questions the notion of borders; the second encompasses the different movements, displacements, immigrations-emigrations that affect a great part of the world’s population and the different consequences that arise; and lastly, the third theme goes deep into the core of modern day megalopolises.

Their Motherland is thus found within a necessary reflection on our place on earth from a position of social denunciation and alert. Within this statement we see how the I inevitably becomes us, due to our interconnection and responsibility towards the rest of humanity.

The photographers of Pandora approach and invite us to come closer to the other, because they understand that “one can only construct oneself through the other, through difference. Difference isn’t something opposed to identity, on the contrary it is completely necessary for it”. That is why their images are not condescending or from an etnocentric point of view, but from a clear position of denouncement. They are consistently denouncing injustices, violence and suffering. Their work culminates as we are led into the inner workings of modern contemporary megalopolises. Pandora makes us understand their rejection to this model of city, where precisely the other and even the I disappear; they are lost in the compact mass, where they wonder in those non-places. A space that, as Auge explains, “does not create identity nor relation, but only solitude and similarity”.

Thus the place that these photographers feel linked to and that they would like everyone to belong to, both those they photograph as well as us as spectators, is a land based on engagement with the other, in a continuous construction with the other.