DROUGHT. The earth is dry - Quei15 ARTgallery

Today we know what it is like to live with drought, and this is precisely the meaning of this photographic exhibition: to represent the drought with images from three photographers with different styles. Both Àngel García and Marc Sanyé are multi-award-winning photojournalists and documentarians who have been immortalizing the drought in Catalonia for five years and with various works. In September 2024, they jointly won the Miravisions award in the professional category for their portraits of the drought and climate change in Catalonia. The award recognizes works published in the media during the year 2023. With the title “Chronicle of a mirage”, Àngel published the winning photographs in Bloomberg Green, and Marc, with the title “Water”, published them in 9 Nou. Letícia Rodríguez, a young photographer with a degree in Fine Arts, has portrayed spaces of solitude in this exhibition to capture found objects, allegorical of the drought. We have, of all three, the enlarged images in large format of Catalonia, the city of Barcelona and its metropolitan area, which encompasses the urban spaces where more than half of Catalans live. In these photographs, the almost microscopic view extracts data from the small details. Architecture creates spaces where water saving, the recovery of green spaces and innovation in urban planning are essential to preserve the environment, but also to improve the quality of life of human beings. Otherwise, thanks to these snapshots of geographical spaces, we can appreciate how the lack of water in the rivers has tattooed drought on the beds of the reservoirs.

ÀNGEL GARCÍA and journalist Laura Millan travel the roads to illustrate what water and agriculture represent for living beings. In the report Crònica d'un miraje, Laura Millan specifies: “showing how agriculture represents a fifth of the Catalan gross domestic product and provides direct employment to more than 177,000 people. The sector demands 70% of the water consumed each year in Catalonia”. They also tell us about how the lack of water affects the people of the territory: “Local production contributes to food security at a time when geopolitical crises, such as wars or pandemics, alter global food distribution chains”.

In the words of MARC SANYÉ: “The Urgell Canal, for the first time in its history, has had to close its gates, leaving all the crops on the land irrigated by this canal in an extreme situation. Farmers in the Lleida region are forced to stop watering their fruit trees, endangering both this year’s harvest and the trees. Marc insists, in his report Aigua, that “Catalonia has 1,331,906 hectares of forest. Of these, more than 33,000 have been affected by drought, and 5,993 hectares of conifers have died due to lack of water.”

LETICIA RODRÍGUEZ ventures with the Reloj de Arena project to reflect the drought in the city of Barcelona: "Through this series of photographs, I wanted to appropriate objects charged with resonance in our collective memory and give them an allegorical meaning in relation to the drought."

Images of loneliness exude maturity in everyday settings where creatures are used to seeing a decadent environment. "This project connects with the idea of still life through images that, despite their stillness, speak of constant change, a world that ages and transforms before our eyes."

We can no longer make death live. It no longer beats, it no longer breathes, and now the earth is dry. Tears do not help to raise the seeds from the barren earth. The eyes of the spectators think that they will see a new cycle of life, but the constant future is uncertain. Today, we know what it is to live with drought. We sow seeds, we sing songs so that it rains!, but with the hand of politics in favor of nature. Manel Sanz, curator of: Drought, the earth is dry. _ March, 2025