Aleix Plademunt remembers the first photos he took and feels sorry for himself. “I called them ‘projects’ but they were actually ‘exercises’.” He says that in perspective, almost about to publish his latest project, which he has been macerating for 7 years.

Almost There was his consecrating work published on paper in 2013, co-edited with the MACK publishing house and Cal’Isidret, a publishing house that he created together with Juan Diego Valera and Roger Guaus almost 10 years ago. The new work is called Matter, it will be ready in April 2022, printed and presented as part of an exhibition. But Almost There also continues to be an exercise. This time, the one who is activated is the spectator, invited to travel on the map and in time, to change the way of measuring distances, to receive an image without further explanation.

How did you get to your last job?

Iberia is an accident for me. A beautiful accident. I finished Almost There and started working on Matter, which I am now working on publishing. In 2018 I traveled from Valencia to Brazil by boat with the intention of imitating the colonial journey of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. I wanted to photograph hundred-year-old rubber trees exploited during the colony. I was planning to include only one or two images in Matter. Initially I went to photograph rubber plantations in the interior of the state of São Paulo, and then I entered Peru. The rubber is originally from the Amazon rainforest. Then several people told me: “You should visit Iberia, there you will find the trees you are looking for.” I traveled to Iberia. Apart from the huge hundred-year-old trees, I was surprised that it was called “Iberia”, a town in the middle of the Amazon. Being born in the Iberian Peninsula, I felt challenged. At that moment I thought there was a topic beyond my central project.

The Matter project revolves around matter, which is everything we know (and what we don’t know). The project itself is a failure, a failed project since I cannot photograph or speak at all. This interests me as a starting point. For seven years I have not been able to finish Matter, but in three days I was able to start and finish Iberia and face two things. First of all, Why is there a place called Iberia in the Peruvian Amazon jungle? I investigated and quickly discovered that the Spaniard Máximo Rodriguez traveled to that town, instigated his own genocide, killed, displaced, exploited labor and rubber for 40 years.

The second thing that caught my attention was that all these events had happened only 116 years ago and that they were totally contemporary episodes. I decided to make a 116-page book to dialogue with this date. The structure of the book is simple: on the cover you can see an Iberian sculpture in the National Museum of Archeology in Madrid, a pre-Roman culture present in the Peninsula for 2300 years, mainly on the Mediterranean coast. On the back cover there is a photograph of a sculpture by Máximo Rodríguez in the Iberia square, Peru. That contrast interested me. The inside of the book is a journey from when I enter the jungle until I find the trees. One of the objectives was to imitate a possible look of Máximo Rodríguez in that place in his search for rubber trees.

Almost There also has to do with time and travel…

Almost There begins with a letter that was lost in Michigan in 1909, far from where I am. At the same time a meteorite arrives in Garraf, Barcelona, ​​very close to where I am. Something is lost and something is found at the same moment but in places far away. The cover is a photograph of my cells, it has to do with that desire to travel and know something intimate and close.

On the next page is the photograph of the star VY Canis Majoris the largest hypergiant star known. A star that exceeds thousands of times the size of the sun is on the page of the book and in some copies it is not seen properly. I liked that gesture and contrast. There is also a photograph of Andromeda, the galaxy closest to Earth although located 2,5 million light years away. I tried to classify the way we observe and measure different places, events or situations.

Each project is a consequence of the previous one. The main theme of Almost There is to question the absolute value of things (and my photographic process as well). This is a very abstract concept, difficult to resolve in photographies. I needed something that I could face more easily. So I started working with distances and questioning them. I started to measure and photograph different physical, temporal, emotional, photographic separations and distances…

How do you edit to build such a story?

I am interested in the work process in which one image suggests another to me. I am interested in confronting images or situations that we apparently do not associate, causing collisions between them, linking opposites, generating a new image in the mind of the person who sees it.

I can present a photograph of a tree, then I notify you that this tree is located in Hiroshima and is seventy years old. You may wonder if it was planted after the explosion and you think of the atomic bomb; that tree is no longer just a tree to be a symbol. I am interested in using photography in such a way that the reading of the images can have a much longer journey or perhaps it will never be completed.

Is that why in Almost There there are almost no texts, are they at the end of the work?

The book has no title on the cover, there is nothing on the book spine, there is no text. Just my name on the second page next to the publisher’s, and that’s where the images begin. I wanted that the person who faces the book has to construct the meaning, that he is an active reader. The main idea is to question the absolute value, that there is no single way of doing things, of looking, of seeing, of reading.

Then I understood that the book could not have a single reading, could not put captions on it and direct people. It interests me more that the person has to complete that image by himself. In a way he had to build something with the images presented and that each one, depending on their background, their interests, their context and her life in short, could complete the meaning. There are many intentions and reasons why each image has been taken. At the end of the book there is a page with a list of intentions and a more extensive reading is invited.

Like Almost There, Iberia was published by your own publisher, Cal’Isidret.

Yes. Those books exist because with a couple of friends, Roger Guaus and Juan Diego Valera, we created the publishing project Cal’Isidret in 2011. Iberia is one of those small projects, it is difficult for someone to publish them because perhaps they are not so commercial, but that gives a meaning to my career.

Juan, Roger and I have been friends for a long time. At first each one worked on their own, we were disconnected from the artistic and photographic context but for us it was stimulating to share moments, exchange experiences with twenty years. We used to go to work at Cal’Isidret, Roger’s private house, which is on the outskirts of Barcelona, ​​in the countryside. It was a way to escape the city.

We went out to take photos, new ideas and we began to conceive fanzines and models for ourselves, just as a souvenir: three or four copies that we accidentally started signing as Cal’Isidret, as a tribute to the place where all that happened. Then, in 2010, Juan was going to visit his family in Córdoba, Argentina, and we decided to accompany him. There we decided to replicate a project like the ones we were doing in the Cal’Isidret area. We carried out The Soil Movement project. We gave it that name because it was a moment when we were questioning the pillars of our photography (or perhaps this project made us question them).

I was at a controversial moment with my personal photographic process. That journey was intense and allowed a solid foundation to begin work. When we returned we went to knock on the doors of some publishers but none of them were interested in publishing the project. At that moment we seriously decided to start a publishing project. Almost 10 years have passed and we have made more than 23 publications.

Is it true that you started with an enlarger that your aunt gave you?

When I was just 15 years old, I set up a small black and white laboratory in my house. At that time Iwas playing in marching bands and was always taking photos of concerts and bands. My relationship with photography started with music. When I went to study at the university, I also installed an enlarger in my house and spent hours copying photos that I took at the university. One day I understood that there was no point in pursuing engineering studies. I didn’t see myself working as an engineer, I didn’t see myself there at all. I don’t know with what courage, but I saw the possibilities that photography had.

In 2003, for an exchange between universities, I spent seven months in Puebla, Mexico. It was the first time I had left Europe. I had only traveled close to my country, to nearby places. It helped me to get to know a different context, a different way of relating to nature, to the place, to its past. It made me question things about my place.

You were 23 years old, you were young, one think is old at that age…

I was young, yes. Two or three years ago I returned to Mexico, I was working on a project for three months and I was in contact with friends that I met in 2003, and the feeling was that it had been more than 15 years but my dynamics had not changed so much: travel, photography, projects. I felt joy and some sadness because things have not changed as much as I thought, with the good and the bad things…

You say it was like accumulation to later forge your look and your working method. Almost There is the first big project, right? How would you define it?

In Almost There is a consequence of this question. I avoid a unique way of looking. In that job there was a break, I abandoned serial work, I introduced a central concept which I tried to approach from multiple angles without repeating each other. I tried photographing with different cameras. That is normal. Many times when I am in a class I use it as an exercise reference. Something that would have to be “normal” when creating a photographic project was not so for me until then, perhaps due to all the limitations that I had, what I did not learn or how I learned photography, I had to discover it on a trial and error basis.

With Cal’Isidret you published The Documentary Illusion, by the Japanese photographer and essayist Takuma Nakahira. An honor…

Takuma Nakahira was a photographer, critic, essayist. In 2015 I went to an exhibition in Tokyo and I started looking for his photobooks but everyone talks to me about his essays. I kept that in mind. The same year I was able to get an artist residency, I returned to Japan and that mantra of Nakahira’s texts persisted. When I tried to read him I realized that there was nothing translated. I was lucky to have mutual friends with his editor so I got in touch and we raised the possibility of translating a collection of his essays into a language other than Japanese for the first time.

We decided to do the translation into Catalan and Spanish, it is a double edition. Those are very interesting texts. There is a part on how the artist deals with his work and a part on semiotics, on how to look, to observe, and the questions that he has as a photographer.

While we were making the book he passed away. Nakahira was a very unique character. He had a very intense relationship with photography. At a specific moment he goes into crisis with his work and burns the negatives, as a spite. He doesn’t do it like other artists who burn his work to make a piece of it, but he burns them out of fury, in a way, like repudiation of his previous work. Alcohol drives him into an ethyl coma. He is in the hospital, he loses his memory, he wakes up speaking Spanish, it is all very unusual. They explain to him that he was a photographer. All that he wrote in his previous essays became a very heavy burden to carry, and that led to his collapse. After that crisis he was intellectually affected and unable to write or read what he had previously thought, but he begins to take pictures again, little by little, and for me that’s the most interesting part of his work. In a way, in an almost poetic way, with a clean and pure gaze, perhaps innocent as well, he manages to do what he did not achieve from his conscience.

Did his way of looking influence yours?

When I read his essays, I was already 37 or 38 years old, it was recently. It annoyed me that I read it so late. It would have saved me seven or eight years of headaches.