Judith Prat (Altorricón, Huesca, 51 years) has been portraying the wounds of the world that have not managed to heal. Its lens has accompanied it to the corners of the globe where it lives and has inhabited pain: the exploitation in the mines of Coltán in the Congo, the abuses in the Niger delta, the violence of Boko Haram in Nigeria, or the femicides in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico). In his new project, the exhibition entitled That fog, this silencethat is part of the programming of Photospaña and that after passing through Madrid will be in Zaragoza in September, addresses the puncture past slave of Spain – the last European country to abolish slavery, at the end of the 19th century – and portrays the traces that it continues to leave in the present.
And it does it through a “historical, geographical and visual” trip, following the passage of the slaves in what has been called as triangular trade: from Sierra Leone and Ghana, passing through the ports of Cádiz and Barcelona, until reaching Cuba, the final destination of many slaves. “We speak one of the greatest devaluations of the human being. A past so uncomfortable that even today is still obvious,” says the photographer in telephone conversation. “I am not historian or political analyst, I am only an artist,” he says later to justify a battery of direct answers and in which he will talk about systematic racism, repair and historical memory.
Ask. The exhibition is titled That fog, this silence. Is there a silence in Spain around slavery?
Answer. It is something that is not forgotten, is that it has deliberately hidden. But, on the other hand, it is incontestable because we have such an amount of information that there is no doubt about what happened. Around 15 million people were taken from Africa, forced to be enslaved, and two and a half million of those people were displaced to the Spanish colonies.
P. And why still hidden?
R. Probably because it is a hard and very difficult past to assume. The slaves always tried to hide what they had done. And today the same thing continues to happen. Monuments are still seen to people who were slaves in which their past is not mentioned. There is still a clear will to hide that past. I believe that having an episode as hard and as close as the civil war was and that the most recent memory in the country has not even been clearly resolved, it has made us somehow leave other memories and other relevant facts in our history in the background. That and that the victims are far or do not consider them part of who we are, although they are.
P. Why is it important to recover the past?
R. We must face our past honestly and to understand what we are as a society and where we come from. Especially since it allows us to address very current debates, such as racism or hate speeches that I perceive.
P. Racism and hate speeches he speaks of, are they consequences of slavery?
R. Slaveness is part of what our identity has built. The vestiges of slavery are obvious. But perhaps its most dangerous footprint is immaterial, that perverse and fallacious idea of the white superiority that we have incorporated as individuals and as a society. It comes from not recognizing our history. And the problem is that racism is not an individual attitude, it is not a specific attitude. The problem is that it is structural, it crosses us all as a society, the structures of the State, it is part of who we are.
P. Why choose contemporary images to tell that past?
R. Memory for me is not past, it is present. I am interested in the possibility of generating counters and using the strength and potential of the image to build collective imaginary that they repair. Especially since that allows us to bring the past to the present. The photographs seek to evoke more than narrate with literality, but they have a rigorous story of an intense investigation. There are also file images that dialogue and melt with my images and I believe that that enriches the visual experience of the viewer. Taking out the documents from the file and taking them to an exhibition hall has allowed me greater freedom of creation and the possibility of deriving my images more to the field of suggestive and evocation. I did not want to reproduce the violence in my images, rather I have sought for the viewer to feel trapped by the photographs and propose a revealing trip that somehow pushes us out of the fog and the silence.
P. How has this trip built?
R. I have gone from the ports of Cádiz or from Barcelona, to the coast of Sierra Leone and Ghana, where people who were forced to leave Africa were captured in ships towards Cuba or Dominican Republic, the Spanish colonies. With this in some way I wanted to provoke in the viewer the same resonance that I have felt in this journey inside our collective identity.
P. How was the documentation process?
R. Always dedicate a long time to the investigation, it is a phase that I consider essential. In addition, it is there where the images are already beginning to form, even of places that I do not know, and somehow the puzzle of the narration that I want to carry out through the images begins to fit. I have also gone to the original sources, the archives in Cuba or in Spain, where reality is revealed unquestionally. There is no doubt about what happened because many documents of the time are preserved, for the sale of people, of persecution of slaves trying to flee …
P. Was there something that, with all that documentary base, moved or surprised him when he visited the sites?
R. That in no way minimized the impact that caused me to travel those places. Places where the memory of the suffering that was lived has not been lost. It happened to me very clearly in Africa, in the castles of Elmina or Cape Coast in Ghana, where people were stored before being embarked towards America. And it happened to me in Cuba, where I could visit old mills, which were those agricultural and industrial complexes dedicated to sugar cane and sugar production, where slave labor was used and thanks to that they enriched themselves in an extraordinary way. There are the descendants of the enslaved people who tell what happened, who know him perfectly. There are testimonies that reach the present of violence that was used against slaves and slaves in those plantations.
P. Is there an open wound?
R. Obviously there is an open wound because there has been no recognition and much less repair, right? It is important so we do an exercise to recognize our history and tell it openly.
P. Is it necessary repair?
R. There is no justice if justice is not reparative. So you also have to consider what can be done to, as a society, repair all that happened.