La conquista del hogar

Description

Adriana threw her luggage overboard. She sold her house by the sea, brought symbolic closure to her past works, and set off for an austere, frozen place, occasionally illuminated by the spectral glow of the Northern Lights. The Conquest of Home is the diary of that journey—one that has the Arctic Circle as its geographical destination, but is, in truth, an inward voyage.

Over a year and a half, during which she traveled four times to the most inhospitable regions of Iceland and Norway, Adriana confronted whiteness as territory, destiny, and philosophical stance, capturing with her camera the veins that run through all matter: time. With no tools other than deep breathing, silence, and a dialogue with the image—the diary is also an exquisite log of photographic practice and of the emergence, in Adriana, of audiovisual language—she explored the milestones and boundaries of her life, guided by a single impulse: to find her own trace, which is to say, her own home.

Birth, the arrival of the camera and the possibility of recording, precarious life, love, disappearance, guilt, teaching, photographic essays, and the eternal question about the nature of bonds—and our bond with nature—are all part of the same inquiry: What remains in us when we let everything go?

With risk and humility, mounted on her Leica like a rider on a horse that allows her to go further, Adriana seeks for immensity to reveal the path that matters: the one that leads to the dissolution of the self and allows us to understand what our passage through the Earth is made of, what place we occupy within the concert of matter that is the universe. This intimate—almost archaeological—exercise lays bare a skeleton, a personal cartography, a puzzle already assembled with space left for one final piece: the person, stripped and free of artifice, occupying their place like a newborn returning to the maternal womb.

Adriana is a master in the most transcendent sense of the word. This book is the true and universal account of her search. And it is also an offering.

Josefina Licitra