Spirits and Demons

2011. The natural world serves as a refuge for ancestral beings who inhabit forests, oceans and skies, and who gradually concealed their presence from humans over time, leaving only faint echoes preserved in myths and legends. These supernatural beings change their names from one culture to another, yet their intentions remain ambiguous. They prefer to watch us rather than be seen. The Spirits and Demons project reveals, through photographs of real spaces —except for their induced repetition— the existence of these creatures, showing their previously unseen presence in the natural world, whether tending to the forest, commanding the sea or watching from the sky. The echo of magical thought seems to slip into the realm of logic, recovering an animistic understanding of the world. Wherever we look, we find souls, spirits and supernatural entities, halfway between gods and humans —sometimes destructive, at other times protective. They are beings so ancient that they have inhabited the universe long before humankind, yet their destiny remains inevitably bound to ours. Spirits are energetic and sensitive beings, guardians of life, dwelling in the four elements (fire, air, earth and water) that shape the universe. Although benign, they may cease to be so if they feel threatened or offended. They have the capacity to safeguard nature, and even humankind, from various dangers. Demons are ruthless, amoral creatures, detached from the emotional world of humans and other living beings. For this reason they are feared, and their presence is especially intimidating. In 1890, Sir James George Frazer wrote an influential study, The Golden Bough, which shares its title with Turner’s painting and lies somewhere between the scientific and the poetic. Through this work, which seeks to explain religious codifications through ancient myths and rites, Frazer delves into the remnants of ancestral worship, identifying forests as the first sacred enclosures and situating within them stories containing profound reflections on the relationship between humans, deities and the life of nature. Today, spirits and demons of many kinds —each with their own personality and a history as old as the world itself— see their habitats diminishing and find themselves confined to ever smaller spaces. Some demonstrate clear hostility towards humans, whom they regard as responsible; others face the situation with indifference. They are dethroned demigods, remnants of the past, beings so ancient that some have forgotten even their own name or existence. But they have now been revealed and will be shown to all who are willing to encounter them. We find our own spirits and demons within the images, halfway between the physical and the incorporeal. It is time to look in order to truly see, entering the mystical universe of these primordial beings.