Touching a continent: 1) China hidden in the details

Tourists are like comets flying at high speed near our planet: can they ever tell their companions in deep space about its infinite complexities and contradictions, having only glimpsed it for a few hours? If they are honest comets, certainly not.

And so, returning from a trip to that immense continent that is China, I identify with that comet and admit that I have barely touched its surface, drawing some fragmentary impressions, like someone looking through a kaleidoscope.

And it is only this flight that the photographs I will present in this and other works speak of: partial and disconnected images that flounder between a few references to the immense iconographic heritage of that great country we carry with us and the remote possibility of glimpsing something more personal.

The images we produce are based on what we initially have in our heads, having read or seen it before, and only afterwards, and not always, on the little that a too-quick tour allows us to see and photograph.

Therefore, I wanted to begin this fragmentary collection of impressions from my tour of China with a theme that is familiar to me: a slightly oblique view of some small things, details, still lifes and situations of no importance. But always seasoned with a great human sympathy for things or people encountered during the journey.