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Recuerdo de las Navidades, 2006

Christmas Memories, 2006
Photograph, 8 photographs of various dimensions
For years, Iñaki Bonillas has been working with the archives of his maternal grandfather and amateur photographer, José María Rodríguez Plaza, who was exiled in Mexico when he was twenty years old and never returned. In one of the albums in this archive he found a photographic portrait of his great-grandmother Pilar. The picture, signed by his uncle Carlos Somonte in 1982, indicated that this was copy number two of five. Bonillas decided to trace the fate of the four remaining copies, pursuing the various lives of the same image on the understanding that, in photography, the reality of the negative is always spectral.
The artist documents the place where the copies of the portrait of his great-grandmother Pilar are now and puts them next to portraits of other members of the family in an intergenerational dialogue outside of time. The work emphasises the manipulation of memory and the dialectic between the original and copy in photography.

Technical details

Original title:
Recuerdo de las Navidades
Registration number:
5011
Artist:
Bonillas, Iñaki
Date created:
2006
Date acquired:
2012
Fonds:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
Object type:
Photograph
Media:
Inkjet print on paper
Dimensions:
8 photographs of various dimensions
Edition number:
Edició de 3 + 1 P.A.
Credits:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. Long-term loan of Álvaro López de Lamadrid
Copyright:
© Iñaki Bonillas
It has accessibility resources:
No

The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.

For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.

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