Series of self-portraits that inhabit those other spaces, between the intimate, at home, and the imaginary. In a certain way, a surrealist poetics of inhabited space.

Following the French philosopher and writer Gaston Bachelard, I re-imagine my being in my home, in my intimate spaces with my objects, dreaming with me being Nature, and the idea of returning back to home after being out.

"If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.”

Gaston Bachelard “The Poetics of Space”, 1964

These minimalist hand-cutted Collages are made with my first Black and White photographs and early slides. (2003/2016). But in some of my late collages (2022) I used digital medium after scanning the film, trying to layer and juxtapose two  images in one to express my daydreaming.

After more than 10 years forgotten, the need arose to look for them in my archives, to combine them, to cut them out, to paste them together, to stich them and in that way, to reconstruct some memories, perhaps with the nostalgia of better times.

© Susana I. Espana