|        

Walls


© Juan Fabuel


year: 2005


technique: photography. Archival pigment print on dibond


sizes: 120 x 150 cm / 84 x 100 cm



Two extremes connected by rough materials that stress the differences. Walls is a personal journey through our inner fears as human beings, focussing on the sad behaviour of building walls to separate what we do not feel comfortable with, and taking as a reference to the Israeli society and its conflicts. I tried to involve myself in both sides of the story while I was photographing, as a natural way to become neutral and hopefully to feel for a second, the real weight of those walls. It was really hard to stand still without feeling sorrow in front of an artificial dune constructed to divide a rich Jewish town from a poor Arab village, or being by the fence of the most famous religious wall that separates men and women. All those artificial barriers are made to avoid the others existence, whatever that means, and have become an extraordinary way to unseal well-preserved fears. 

My aim was to produce a consistent body of work that could become a humble approach to an unsolved problem. I realized that those powerful landscapes and figures had a hidden power, a latent and almost inaudible speech that forced me to look in unexpected directions. The goal of this idea is to transform into photographs the mistake of dividing instead of unifying. Just because of the fear of the other.

__