INTERIORS

Vanessa Miralles takes on the role of a witness to spaces usually hidden from our eyes. These are private and intimate spaces that emerge from the landscape and take shape in an organic and seemingly chaotic way, much like a forest as it grows. La Floresta is a residential district of Sant Cugat del Vallès, near Barcelona, which was originally developed as a summer resort neighborhood and over time has come to host a diverse mix of people. All of this gives the district a strong bohemian flavor. The author arrived in this neighborhood fourteen years ago and immediately fell in love with its forest-like, fresh, and humid atmosphere, which carries the scent of chimneys in winter and warmed pines in summer, but also with its unpaved streets often lacking sidewalks, its chaotic and improvised urban layout, its aging houses, the tangles of cables crossing its streets, and a genuine, wild air in every sense. As she got to know the inhabitants of these houses, she realized they were as diverse as the architecture among which they lived. Avant-garde, modernist, or Noucentista houses (some of them protected) coexist alongside self-built, humble, sometimes very small houses that almost seem made of cardboard. Similarly, among these inhabitants are found wealthy families seeking a quiet residential neighborhood, third- and fourth-generation petit-bourgeois summer residents, workers fleeing an overcrowded Barcelona, and squatters who occupy homes either out of social conscience or necessity. It is inside these homes that the nature of their diverse residents is revealed and made evident. The author allows the viewer to enter spaces not always shaped by an aesthetic criterion sought by their creator but constructed over time through the layering of the life traces of all who have inhabited them. We often say the phrase, “if these walls could talk…” This is precisely what Vanessa Miralles seeks: to make the walls speak. In this way, the “portrait” of a bedroom, a living room, or a bathroom can become the portrait of a person or family, however absent they may be in the photograph. Miralles seeks to document imperfection, the unprepared, distancing herself from the aesthetic criteria of interior design magazines that show idyllic spaces the reader wants to recreate to reach the supposed ideal life they promise, usually in exchange for a significant financial investment. Vanessa Miralles’s interior photographs share a sense of beauty unrelated to how much care the inhabitant has taken to embellish them. She focuses her aesthetic interest on the most unexpected places. We find ourselves, as viewers, surprised and delighted as we contemplate spaces we might not even have noticed.