ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

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Iñigo Sesma transforms his travels across the United States into a process of visual and conceptual exploration, where photography and painting intertwine to recompose a reality loaded with history, memory, and resilience. His creative process begins long before setting foot on the ground: he researches routes and landscapes, studies satellite images, traces possible itineraries through Google Maps and connects with local photographers who share his aesthetic and thematic interests. Then, during the trip, the unpredictable takes center stage.

 

His gaze is drawn to the margins, to those areas where precariousness and isolation weigh heavily on the landscape. Disordered neighborhoods, caravans disguising abandonment, dilapidated structures: forgotten spaces that stand as remnants of a better past. Along the way, he visits diners, those roadside restaurants where regulars and passing travelers coexist daily, capturing the essence of a life suspended between rootedness and constant movement.

 

The Dust Bowl project takes its name from the environmental disaster that devastated millions of hectares in the Great Plains of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico during the Great Depression of the 1930s, triggering the largest internal migration in U.S. history. The misery and despair of those years left deep scars that still permeate the landscape and the collective memory of those who inhabit it. Sesma travels through these territories tracing the marks of this complex historical burden and establishing connections between the traumatic past and the new crises that continue to shape the lives of these communities.

 

More than a mere documentary record, the artist’s work questions social structures and examines the cycle of abandonment that persists across different eras and contexts. “Dust Bowl” transcends the historical episode to become a contemporary symbol of resilience in the face of adversity. The perseverance of its inhabitants transforms this experience into a reflection on the fragility of progress while simultaneously reaffirming humanity’s ability to adapt to uncertainty and overcome difficulty.

 

text by Manuela Medina