Unconditionally, I Love You

About

Photography by Jorge Monedero. Words by Silvia Terrón

Curated by Antonio Molina-Vázquez

This event is part of Spain NOW! 2019

“Unconditionally, I love you” is an exhibition that tells, in images and text, a story of change, memory, love and hope, retracing the path of the different generations of a Spanish family from 1920 to the present day.

The starting point of the project was a box of old photos that ended up in the hands of the London-based Spanish photographer Jorge Monedero after the death of his grandmother. These photos became a gateway to understanding his family’s past – through a process of conversation and enquiry with the living members of the family - but they also awakened in him the need to return to the same places where those images had been taken to portray the generations that followed and the country he had left behind long ago.

Soon Silvia Terrón, a writer who has also been looking at Spain from a distance for many years, in London and Paris, joined the project. Both shared the samesensitivity towards the quest for their origins, finding in their faces and gestures echoes of their ancestors, sensing the effects of memory and oblivion and the strength of the bond of unconditional love that can unite a family despite the different, even divergent, paths that each of its members may take.

Monedero and Terrón define the project in these terms: “at some point in life one inevitably looks back at the place one comes from, be it through a physical return or a journey back in time through our memories. This experience changes us forever. We realise, however, that despite our diverging vital paths - those who remained have become others, too - love makes the bond indissoluble.