Life Sentence
The project
There are projects that document pain. And there are projects that are made of it. Life Sentence belongs to the second category.
Every day, I take a drug that makes my life possible. It comes in a small bottle, in blue liquid form. Without it, I cannot leave my bed. Without it, there is no studio, no camera, no work. Without it, this project would be a silence rather than a statement. That drug is my freedom as well as my chain.
For reasons I could not immediately articulate, I began saving the empty bottles. It was not a conceptual decision, not at first. It was something closer to instinct, or perhaps to grief. Years accumulated alongside the bottles, and by the time the first project idea was conceived, more than six hundred of them had gathered in my studio.
But the most demanding gesture of the project did not take place in front of the camera. Throughout the entire production of the series, I withheld a portion of my daily dose. Redirecting it, drop by drop, into a single 750ml bottle. That bottle is now part of the exhibition and will be of many to come. It is full. What it contains is not simply medication: it is the concentrated residue of the pain I endured during its filling and working this project. A vessel of suffered time. This work was not only made about pain; it was made through it.
At the heart of the project lies a photograph titled North and South. And with it, the ethical axis around which everything else turns. Because the same bottle, the same drug, the same necessity in a different country, on a different side of an invisible global line could represent an impossible expense, or simply an absence. I ask the viewer to hold two realities simultaneously: the life I am able to live, and the life I would be living had I been born further south. Geographic location, in this context, is not circumstance. It is fate.
I consider myself fortunate. I mean it without irony, and without comfort.
Norte y Sur, from Life Sentence project.
Exhibitions
Life Sentence opening at Photo España 2023 (Madrid)
Life Sentence premiered in Madrid as part of the 2023 edition of PhotoEspaña, after its international recognition as a single winner of The Prix de la Photographie Paris.
At the center of the solo exhibition stood not only the photographs, but a single 750ml bottle bearing the weight of a deeply personal sacrifice. To fill it, I suspended my prescribed medication for chronic pain throughout the entire duration of the project’s development. That bottle is, in its most literal sense, my pain rendered visible.
The project unfolded across two distinct phases. The first was a meticulous process of preparing the more than 600 small bottles I had accumulated over time: cleaning each one individually, a labor as tedious as it was necessary. Once ready, the photographs were made over two dedicated working days in my Madrid studio, under exclusively natural light.
The exhibition also featured a large-scale installation composed of every bottle used throughout the project. Visitors were invited to take one of these small vessels with them as a gesture through which they became participants in the work itself, carrying a fragment of the project with them selfs.
Life Sentence in Helsinki, Finland.
I was honored to receive an invitation from Kookos Gallery in Helsinki to participate in their exhibition Stories of Life, an acknowledgment that Life Sentence was deemed a compelling and natural fit for the curatorial vision behind the project.
he exhibition took place in October 2025, following a previous presentation at Studio Arriaza, a venue whose team handled my work with exceptional care and remarkable sensitivity, for which I remain profoundly and sincerely grateful.
