­M(OTHER)LAND

When I was a child I thought every country was somebody's mother and Spain happened to be mine, or maybe it was the other way around, every mother was somebody's country and mine happened to be mine.

Then I did what everyone in my generation was trained to do: I left. We were told that staying was a form of failure and that airports were a form of intelligence. For years I collected homes while others built theirs strong (or so I thought).

One day I noticed that the word motherland has the word other hiding inside it. It had been there the whole time, like a stranger asleep in the family house. That is how M(OTHER)LAND came up: my country and I, looking at each other across a screen, unsure which one of us had changed.

Now I return to the south with a camera, half daughter, half foreigner, and I photograph it the way you would photograph someone you love but no longer live with. 

Is a homeland the place where you were born, or the place that keeps being born from you?

I never came home. Home just stopped waiting, life continued happening, and that finally made it urgent to look.