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We can not and we must not ignore the fact that in Spain, 80% of the population lives on 20% of the territory and, vice versa, 80% of the territory is inhabited by only 20% of inhabitants. As a result, Action Cultural Española (AC / E) decided to launch the Alma Tierra photographic project and to present it at the Diputacion de Huesca as part of the Visiona / Hu program.

As Julio Llamazares points out in the accompanying text, Alma Tierra wants to be ”an elegy, a speech against the marginalization of some Spaniards and a call for contemplation”. It is also a tribute, according to its author, photographer José Manuel Navia who has spent a large part of his career travelling the roads of the deep Spanish countryside. A tribute to a culture, to its memory and to the people who are there, who resist against all odds and who have made possible the exhibition Alma Tierra and the eponymous book, co-edited with Ediciones Anómalas.

”Even though it only appears explicitly in some of the photographs in this book, in almost all of them we perceive the presence of the sign we’ve been seeing for years on our travels to so-called empty Spain and that sums up the message of this work by José Manuel Navia: FOR SALE. Everything is for sale: houses, land, horizons, even the souls of villages whose residents abandoned them in search of a better, or at least a less lonely, life. While urban and peripheral Spain grows disproportionately, inland and rural Spain are suffering in extremes that would surprise even Spaniards if, besides speaking of depopulation and abandonment as they often do of late, they decided to check the extension and importance of both phenomena for themselves.” – Julio Llamazares, from the text of the book