Bleda y Rosa

María Bleda

Born in 1969 in Castellón (Spain), she lives and works in London.

José María Rosa

Born in 1970 in Albacete (Spain), he lives and works in London.

From 1989 to 1994 Maria Bleda and José Maria Rosa studied at the School of Art and Design in Valencia, Spain, where they began to work together. Their first photo together, one of the first images in the series Campos de Fútbol ("Football Fields"), dates from 1992. Two years later, they produced the first photos in the series Campos de Batalla ("Battlefields"). By the mid-1990s, the duo had already laid the foundations of their style and future obsessions: an approach to the landscape as a trace of history, both small and large, and a desire to activate the latent memory of places. These empty but meaningful horizons activate our imagination, our memory. Thus, their series of photographs, in which the human figure is always absent, echo a ghostly presence, often with a melancholic tone.

At the Château d'eau, they present the serie Memoriales ("Memorials"), consisting of a first series taken in Berlin in 2005, completed by photographs taken in Jerusalem and Washington in 2010, cities where the direct link between memory and the monument is particularly important. Stigmatized or unstigmatized walls, insignificant details of anonymous architecture or famous buildings. Most of the time, only the caption under the photograph informs us about the place and its geographical location. This work addresses different issues such as the materialisation of memory and the inscription of trauma in the structure of the city, the status of places of memory, and the progressive loss of the function of memorials. Thus, Bleda y Rosa explore the link between memory and forgetting.