Kowaremono by Lluís Estopiñan

Kowaremono

The fragility of memory is mirrored in the way old photographs slowly fade within the albums that preserve them. This project centres on four images from a damaged album discovered at the Heian Temple market in Kyoto. Almost erased by the passing years yet recovered from oblivion, they return as testimonies of another time and other latitudes, offering fragments of lives that came before our own. Through intervention and experimentation, small details are enlarged and reimagined—not to restore what has been lost, but to draw attention to what still survives within what is damaged.

Each work takes shape through gestures that alter the surface and extend the life of the image. Spray paint, filtered through tears in the paper, introduces the notion of a wound, as though the photograph itself were absorbing the erosion of memory. Liquid emulsion and cyanotype give material presence to these traces, revealing the way memory unravels and transforms. The same light that once fixed the original image in the land of the rising sun now acts, in the twenty-first century, as a silent presence—recalling what was and sustaining our gaze towards what still looks back at us from the heart of these images.

^{**Kowaremono is the word used in Japan to mark parcels as fragile when sent through the post. Here it becomes a metaphor for the way memory itself bears the marks of time, as fragile and vulnerable as the photographs that preserve it.**}

_{- Cyanotype, painting, graphic marks and Japanese postage stamps on Japanese papers and Fabriano paper. 90 × 65 cm. -}