C a r l o s S e b a s t i á
A r t i s t
A Short Personal Story
I can remember or at least I think so, spaces situations and conversations of my childhood even from the age of 3 years old. I have a personal interest in holding the memories as if they were objects. I observe them to the point of being able to describe the floor of the schoolyard, the scratchy or soft feeling of the different house rugs or the thoughts I had when I learned a new word in front of the cream-colored electric stove. However, I am unable to memorize a sentence by hard for a long time without distraction.
I was always afraid of losing loved ones, of getting away from them. Maybe for that reason, I reproduced the experiences and emotions to infinity developing a particular visual capacity to suggest them. I used everyday object to generate those stimuli. Some thumbtacks, a piggy bank, a lamp or a stain on the wall were enough to move me to another time. The smells in the kitchen, the noise of some keys in a pocket or the humming of a song enough to remember my grandparents.
This was my first photo, I was 5 years old.
Memory is a strange thing. Why should I remember this moment so apparently not very relevant? However, I could reproduce in detail the previous situation without problems.
My grandmother Carmen began to suffer Alzheimer's without anyone noticing. At first, we only thought that she was sad because of my grandfather's death two years earlier and we tried to push her to do things. However, her self-absorption was getting bigger and bigger. She also began to get confused in everyday things such as how many people she should cook. My mother assumed without any doubt caretaker role doing it with devotion for at least the last ten years. We all saw it normal. Machismo is also evident in this field, as in many others.
My grandparents in the apartment 15 years ago - the blue, the light, the breeze, the sounds of the voices, the love
At that time, I was already living in another city and soon I was going to move to China. My grandmother was the person who raised me and with whom I developed an extremely special relationship. Countless memories of my childhood are linked to her and our time together. For her, I know that the feeling was reciprocal. In fact, she was thrilled to see me until the end of her days, even with her inability to talk, eat, move or know where she was. During all that time she was able to link totally distant, in space and time, thoughts and build a totally new situation, I have to say always very funny, to be able to understand her limited reality. She did not know how old we were or what happened in the life of any of us but she always felt the love she had for us.
My cousin, my grandmother and me in the house in the scrapyard - so many objects founded, everything was fun treasures
These experiences led me to wonder about the functioning of our mind. The effort to understand and create, even with a handicap like this, situations that allow us to explain the space that surrounds us. I asked myself about our identity, how that identity is linked to memories. Not only personal but external or collective. As when destroying part of those memories, part of us could also disappear but as emotions were subject to something more profound. I also questioned myself about love and relationships with others.
Thanks to my grandmother I created "Building the Endearment" art project and painted many of the works of "De-Construction." I researched about the way of show traces in the creative processes and used layers that have acted as metaphors of memory.
Currently, all these experiences have created sediments that condition my way of working as an artist. Condition the materials and objects that I use. Condition my interest in creating layers with lights and shadows that veil the space and show a kind of three-dimensional painting. Condition my interest in video or photography as a metaphor for time and the eternal repetition of experiences. Moreover, they especially have conditioned my last turn to create installations where questioning our creative processes of understanding. Suggestive spaces that allow us to interact with others and become aware of our present existence, while we can immerse ourselves in sensations that take us to past experiences or the longings of the future. Living the space-time relationship, from the fragmented perception of what surrounds us and lead us to interpret and to weave our reality.