Absence
by: Romina Belda , June 12, 2022
by: Romina Belda , June 12, 2022
This series of photographs is about the land in the south of Spain, and about my family’s land in particular: farmland that my mother inherited after my grandparents’ deaths. The woman in the pictures is my mother; she devoted herself to its maintenance up until the day she had to sell the property.
The land had belonged to my family since 1920. My grandparents mainly worked in an orchard of palm trees, branching them, tending them, and climbing them to harvest the dates.
I spent many days and weeks on this land growing up, watching what could come from human effort—what the land gave and what it withheld from the people who worked it. My grandmother Angeles moved to the city after my grandfather’s death, but still returned to the land and tended it until she died in 2017. I remember her dedication to caring for it, and her concern about the aridness of the soil and the plants and weeds growing wild. Despite her age, she would bend over and gather them all up, smoothing the surface, carrying the mattock, exhausted. She would take me and my brother to the country with her, and work on the land while we played.
Following my grandmother’s example my mother too dedicated herself to its care.
This series of images speak of heritage, roots, and resistance; absence and what prevails. The land has always been linked with my roots.
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey