VITORIA-GASTEIZ.- This show contains two exhibitions with the same time. One is linked to the other; there is a dialogue between them and, at the same time, with the spectator, immersed in a permanent reflection about himself/herself and about the times in which we are living. At first sight, it is clear that this is a photography exhibition, a discipline which is of great relevance today and which plays an essential role in almost every aspect of our lives: from biographical and autobiographical works to an in-depth knowledge of social, cultural and political events. But the aim of this exhibition is also to reflect upon concepts such as the author and his/her rights, the original, the copy and replica or the large number of considerations raised by advances in technologies.

It seems that the ability to freeze time and to see this frozen by others is especially attractive to those of us who form part of society. It seems also that the amalgam of events in movement that overwhelm us, preventing us from seeing things clearly, to feel the stillness, the moment frozen in time, the fixed expression, gives us the time we need to try and understand ourselves; to draw at least one conclusion, in short, to imagine that we have sufficient time to see the world at such low speed that it seems to be at a standstill, as in these photographs. For that reason, this exhibition is arranged around the idea of a zoom effect in which human beings are the main players, the key to all our questions. From the close up of faces, where we can still find, according to Walter Benjamin, the last traces of the aura, the experience of the artist, collected like a unique fetish object and which the development of technology has diluted through recollection and multiplication, gradually zooming away from the human being, his actions and the effects these have on his environment, until, in a perfectly vicious circle, we arrive at the electrical and mysterious auras of the Kirlian camera.

We accept that the necessary loss of the almost religious aura of the artistic object due to technological development is inevitable and necessary, and here we enter the second level of this exhibition, as the benefits of universal access to arts, the alleged democratisation of aesthetic enjoyment and the disappearance of creative limits have given rise, as corresponds to the technological revolution of the last two centuries, to intense debates about concepts that had been sacred and immutable until then. The aim, therefore, of this exhibition, is to reflect upon concepts such as the author and his/her rights, the original, the copy and replica or the large number of considerations raised by advances in genetic engineering. We will also attempt to tackle allegories that speak to us of infinite possibilities aborted by marketing mechanisms, of the museum replicated as a result of the replicated art it contains (and the other way around too), in short, we attempt to face up to the intense conceptual conflict in which the world of the last arts and, as a consequence, society itself is immersed. For this reason, the exhibition is full of references that we hope will not conceal, in the end, the enjoyment afforded by the photographic works of our times.

You can read here a story that was the first approach to the project created for this exhibition and should therefore be read as a sketch highlighting some of its more interesting features. Like all good sketches, it contains finished parts and others that are incomplete and missing later contributions. Nevertheless, we consider it interesting for the spectator to imagine the process of planning an exhibition.