Los cuerpos
que despedimos
2025
Los cuerpos que despedimos (The bodies we farewell) is an exhibition that forms part of a larger project exploring the bond between humans and dogs. Within this framework, I focus on a journey I undertook to Tokyo in 2024 as a farewell ritual, nine years after the death of my dog, which occurred in 2015 while I was in that same city. The news—received only upon my return to Madrid—marked the beginning of an intimate, long-term investigation.
The installation unfolds in the form of a zuihitsu: a succession of fragments and materials woven together to give poetic shape to an inner journey of parting. Observations about the city, reflections sparked by found images, and a conception of time as a malleable substance converge in a narrative articulated through a text written in the voice of the dog. This voice recounts the journey to Tokyo nine years after her death, while at the same time reflecting on farewell as a symbolic structure. Her own representation—through the archive, the image, the written word, and the installation itself—thus becomes an affective ritual in the face of absence.
The starting point is a personal collection of more than two hundred archival photographs obsessively accumulated since then: images of women with their dogs, reframed to focus on the details where contact between both bodies is registered. These images highlight the affective force of those gestures, as well as the mirror-like mechanism they generate with the memory of her own dog.
Tokyo emerges as a stage charged with resonances, an almost magical space in which I imagine a symbolic reunion between us. In 2015, an intuition had foreshadowed the loss, as if a tremor transmitted from afar had warned me. In 2024, unknowingly, I was heading toward an image that would mark a closure: a photograph found in a park showing a dead dog, covered with a blanket and accompanied by an offering. This unexpected vision became a metaphor for what had been impossible for me at the time: to keep vigil over and bid farewell to her dog’s body at the moment of her death.
This exhibition is part of the CINEX programme of Braga 25 – Portuguese Capital of Culture, supported by the Portuguese Republic – Ministry of Culture / Directorate-General for the Arts, and by RTCP – Network of Portuguese Theatres and Cinemas.
Curating: Eduardo Brito
Printing and framing: Taller Digigráfico
AI video: Cirugía Gráfica
Translation ES-EN: Gabriela Díaz