Sarah Bejerano was born in Havana, but since 2004 she lives and works between Barcelona and Havana. With higher studies in Cinematography, she decided to specialize in documentary and artistic photography, because it was a way of working in a more introspective and personal way. She has participated in workshops and exhibitions in Havana, Madrid and Barcelona.
“Photography has become a means of directly interpreting and narrating my surroundings. I try to articulate the core concepts of small details of everyday life, and to explore the enigmas and tensions hidden within them. My work evolves through constant experimentation and investigation of the possibilities offered by the different photographic, thematic and technical formats. I want to explore the different layers that make up the moments in which we live which are presented as “reality”. In my series, what I look for are sensations, colours and memories and each project is the result of personal reflection, responding to my own physical senses and emotions”.
About ‘An insular journey‘:
My photographic work is focused more and more on Space, and in what way we create, imagine and possess it.
Space defines not only a single dimension, as is commonly believed, in my work this is the constancy of time: from the past and the present, because it reaffirms our passage through that world, our presence and passing. In this series, I work on Space from an autobiographical perspective, as it takes on meaning from the moment I lived. An Insular Journey encompasses the transit through some islands of the world, and what there is in common and different in them.
I had always been interested in working on the topic of insularity, and in what way this label pursues us all our lives, to those of us born in one. This series was born from a verse by the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera: “The damn circumstance of water everywhere” (La isla en peso, 1943). The fact of being born on a piece of land completely surrounded by water involves innumerable contradictory connotations: the sea becomes freedom and prison, the end and the beginning of “something”. Beginning or end of the island; the beginning or end of what is beyond, always as a more or less unattainable promise.
The photographs show the rituals, in terms of exalted daily life, that fall within the insular character: the constant search for an exit means that the journey in circles has no end. The most important thing is not the destination, it is to travel and create our own island with each step.
The photographs of this serie has been made with Kodak Color Plus 200 film, and a Canon FTb.
