Leading Spanish photographer’s studio destroyed by flood

The Spanish artist’s studio was destroyed by catastrophic floods in the country’s eastern region last week, killing more than 200 people and destroying millions of euros worth of property and infrastructure.

Ricardo Casewho lives and works near the town of Torrent on the western outskirts of Valencia, escaped the floods but lost most of his work after his studio was destroyed and his books and photographs washed away.

“We live in the countryside, in an area with several ravines, and my house is on the edge of one of them,” he says. Art newspaper“This place looks different now.” His adjacent ground-floor studio, which he has shared with his bookseller brother-in-law for the past six years, was formerly a carpentry shop. Now it’s a mess, “flooded to the roof.” And yet he knows that he is lucky. “Houses in the neighborhood were destroyed by water.”

Nevertheless, the destruction is enormous. “I’ve used it to store all my exhibits,” says the 53-year-old, “to teach classes, store my book collection, work on editions of my books, produce limited edition fanzines, which I’ve been publishing for years. It was also a place where my daughter could play, a place where she could have fun while working. For me, my studio is a kind of amusement park, a place of stimulation.”

Case is one of the leading figures among the renowned generation of Spanish photographers that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis. He joined the influential Blank Paper collective in 2006 and has published 11 photo albums to date. The cases have been exhibited at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in France and Canal Isabel II in Madrid, and are also represented by galleries in Spain, France, Switzerland and the USA. In 2017 he received the Cultura Comunidad de Madrid award.

The flooding began suddenly on Oct. 29 after a flood that dumped more than a year’s worth of rain in the area where Case lives in just eight hours. “We were at home with the children because heavy rain was forecast and they didn’t go to school. During the day, my wife looked out the window and saw that the ravine was filled with water reaching our house, so she called us all to quickly leave by car. As we walked along the street where my studio was located, I saw the force of the flood waters that flooded everything.

The floods were caused by a phenomenon known locally as DANA, a Spanish acronym for high-altitude isolated depression (high-altitude isolated depression).Depression Icelada in Niveles Altos), in which cold and warm air meet and form powerful rain clouds, resulting in heavy rain, large hail and tornadoes, as was observed last week in the Valencia region.

“The next day I came back to the studio and there was just our van, which was destroyed, and a meter of dirt mixed with a lot of remains of books and frames. But 90% of everything was washed away.

Case is a prolific book maker, often using surprising formats and cutouts, and many of his exhibitions use intricate framing to create interlocking installations. “100 percent loss. I only had paper. I’ve lost all the exhibitions I’ve done since I started photography. All the prototype books I’ve published are Paloma al-Air (his breakthrough project published by Dewey Lewis in 2011, which brought him international attention), El Porque de las Naranjas (Mak, 2014), Estudio Elemental del Levante (Dalpine/torch press/The Ice Plant, 2020)… In my case, this is all a problem because I experiment a lot: testing, writing down ideas on paper before publishing or exhibiting.”

Case is working on an exhibition of new work that opens next month in Heap Culture Artegen at Tabacalera, the International Center for Contemporary Culture in San Sebastian. “Half the production took place in my studio,” he says. “I was very lucky because the Kutch Foundation decided to release it again.” And luckily, he kept his image hard drives elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Sonia Berger, a Madrid-based curator who founded Dalpine, an independent publishing company that has published several Cases books, launched sale of print raise funds for the artist. “We are committed to helping Ricardo recover and continue creating his inspiring works as soon as possible,” she says. “All proceeds from sales, minus bank fees, will go directly to Ricardo to support his recovery.”