Israel Ariño / Clara Gassull, The Okama Paradox, 2022

“They say right here where we are is the Okama crater, but if we can’t see it, how can we be sure it exists?”
– excerpt from Clara Gassull’s notebook.

Travel-the idea of mobility and displacement-has stimulated the work and lives of numerous authors, gaining vital importance in the generation of new artistic proposals. In 2019 we had the opportunity to travel to Japan for the first time, curious to discover a culture that was part of our imagination and had been consolidated in our memory through books and images. For four weeks, the trip allowed us to accumulate experiences, to organize different times-physical, metaphorical, imaginary-to compose them as a reflective territory. In the resulting series, photography and drawing propose other ways of seeing, imagining and feeling what is in front of us. The drawing does so in a more abstract and synthetic way, with a subtle but decisive stroke. Photography, on the other hand, tries to anchor itself in a certain reality and reveal something beyond what its surface shows. Both disciplines seek to share with the viewer temporal processes and experiences that extend into poetic spaces, into more interior echoes. The result is a recording of lived experience, two intertwined stories where each acts as an echo of the other.