CA L’ISIDRET

The Photoforum Pasquart presents the first exhibition in Switzerland of the three photographers, and co-founders of the independent publishing house Ca l’Isidret, Aleix Plademunt (*1980, ES), Juan Diego Valera (*1976, AR) and Roger Guaus (*1972, ES)

They founded Ca l’Isidret Edicions, after meeting and subsequently pursuing a collective project in Argentina in 2010. Ca l’Isidret Edicions also serves as a laboratory, enabling diverse photographic and publishing experiences, and in which the three play the parts of both photographers and editors. They are joint editors of each publication, irrespective of whether the book has been created by one or by all of them. Ca l’Isidret is the name of a house in the Alt Penedès, home to one of the photographers and a frequent meeting place for the three.

They pursue individual careers and are not formally organised as a collective, but they maintain constant strong ties and collaborate frequently on joint projects. While their aesthetics remain different, they share an approach of photography: ceaseless shooting as the response to an environment and to intimate experience, photography as the mass registration of personal experience, and the constantly produced images as a raw and malleable material to be given form through publications and exhibitions.

They were invited by the Photoforum Pasquart to develop a collective project specific to its exhibition spaces. As they were preparing their upcoming residency in Biel, the notion of doubt gradually emerged as the core theme of the project: “a very open idea that at the same time fits very well with our essence as artists, always doubting and hesitating about the necessity and utility of our creations, at both emotional, cognitive and, finally, at artistic levels.”
They produced every image presented in the exhibition during their 10-days residency at the end of April in Biel, photographing the city’s dwellers, its streets and animals, directing their gaze and pointing their cameras at a delicate array of details: domesticated plants and flowers, tedious street signage, shiny and dusty cars, flying crows, statues in the old town, close-up portraits. Accompanying them throughout their simultaneous discovery and shooting of the city was a questioning about wealth. Having heard multiple times in Biel that Switzerland was the richest country in the world – and having promptly verified that the assertion was unfounded – this recurring claim or label nonetheless stuck with them and shaped their experience in Biel. While wealth is not straightforwardly a topic of the exhibition, this statement and the self-perception it implies underlied the processes of production and of selection of the images.