Iñaki Domingo
Spain
Ser Sangre
Ser Sangre
‘Despite I have been working with photography for many years now, every time I talk to my family about my artistic practice they look at me with funny faces. Taking advantage of the fact that I usually spend my summer holidays with them, I decided to propose a collaborative project in which all of them could be involved and actively participate in the process of creating a project.
The initial intention of Ser Sangre was to jointly create a visual totem that showed who we are, how we see ourselves and how we relate to each other; a kind of collective definition of ourselves.
Everyone would provide what they thought could be interesting for the project. Suddenly, and without being aware of the implications, some of them were doing installations, others were doing body painting, others were compiling different kind of files, others were performing actions ... It was amazing to see how naturally and intuitively they were. Meanwhile, I began to collect and document all these materials that were generated by them, apart from contributing to the project with my own photographs.
At the same time, and in a different level Ser Sangre questions and reviews how the family is traditionally represented in family albums and the project rises the question of why the pictures included in these intimate visual memory containers often have a similar appearance; there is a predominance of collections of frozen smiles instead of including “other” moments that are much more common in the daily life of every family. Why in the albums we never see representations of moments that evoke sadness, boredom, anger or routine?’