Santander,
When, back in 2017, Manuel Diego Sánchez joined our team, he explained to us that, from the beginning, he had been working with photographic archives, analyzing the relationships that could be established between one image and another, which is potentially universal in an individual photo. Also investigating the links between these and the landscape or the territory, especially what has to do with displacements and migrations.
The exhibition that is now being presented at the Santander headquarters of the Juan Silió gallery has to do with this second variant of his attention to the image, although it will no longer be about human displacements, but internal, mineral displacements.
The “Fissure and Breath” project, which can be visited until March 7, arises from its encounter with Iceland, a country, as we know, whose geology is still very much alive today, since its small surface is home to thirty active volcanoes. Thus, what emerges from the interior of the earth and what sinks into it are in continuous tension and the past and present, in terms of stratigraphic times, overlap and are not easily dissociable. Any approach to its nature will not give us statism, but rather the fruits of a process, traces of what happened and traces of what is to come.
We are talking about a landscape conducive to speculation and narration, and that is what this Madrid artist set out to do in that field: introduce fictions, design alternative territories based on the analysis of an Iceland never finished in its sediments. After carrying out light and ephemeral interventions and documenting them with analogue means, Sánchez resorted to digital procedures and artificial intelligence to articulate images that contain the Iceland that he had previously captured, but also another; compositions in which familiar visions and strangeness combine.
There are several series compiled in Juan Silió, starting with Fissuresin which he brought his work materials closer to the forces of the earth, submerging absorbent papers in natural fractures through which underground water emerges, which this author later encapsulated in waterproof bags. He was interested in working according to the clues or vestiges that nature offered him only after an effort of investigation, almost with forensic methods.
He also resorted to filming in Super 8: in Attempting to freeze an image in a rectangle He sought to reflect a glacial landscape on a mirror surface, focusing on the difficulties (the impossibility) of immortalizing that which never remains still. Given the infeasibility of freezing the dynamic, Sánchez claims a possible consideration of photography as visual proof of the elusive thing that does not stop, as particular evidence of a failure in trying to solidify it.
In the set Breath Possibility He returned to work with archival photographs, which after examination he intervened using artificial intelligence to incorporate fictional elements into them: variations and mismatches that introduce instability. Even in an archive, the author proposes, the image does not have to be a closed work in which the essay does not fit: landscapes can constitute possibilities and not statements.
And finally, although it occupies a central place in this exhibition, we must mention Herðubreiðthe series that shares its name with an old volcano that is the highest mountain in Iceland, often represented by its artists and photographed; an inseparable element of the population’s imagination. Sánchez emphasizes that, for these reasons, the volcano has become a malleable image, interpreted over and over again: our vision of it has less to do with the geographical phenomenon itself than with the sum of views that accumulate on it.
That is the reason that, in the compositions that make up this work, the Herðubreið It is never shown to us as fixed and stable, but rather subject to the artist’s readings (the ones we see, which could have been other). Parallels are proposed between the energy latent in it and the character of the images as a never-sealed possibility.
Manuel Diego Sánchez. “Fissure and breath”
JUAN SILÓ GALLERY
C/ Sol 45, ground floor
Santander
From January 16 to March 7, 2026
