Interview with Visual Artist and Educator Pablo Lerma
By Artyom Napolskiy
20 December 2020
The WebsterCanal team had a chance to interview Pablo Lerma, a visual artist, publisher, and educator from Spain. He has been teaching at the Webster University Leiden Campus since 2018. Currently, Pablo is also teaching at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Pablo used to live in New York before moving to the Netherlands. He is really excited to bring his international experience as well as educational experience to Webster Leiden during his stay in the Netherlands.
Arty: We read about your Greenfield project; it really is fascinating. Can you tell us more about it? We want to also know about how you put everything together, selected the photos, approached the writers? How has this project come together?
Pablo: I was based in the United States for almost seven years. It was around 2016 when I was taking a walk at a flea market in Manhattan where my husband came across a box full of envelopes. Those envelopes were full of black and white negatives. I asked the vendor if he could tell me about the origin of these negatives. The vendor told me that the box of negatives was acquired through the auction and the people who organized the auction, gave him information about the origin of these negatives. The information was concise, and they said that the negatives were found in photo establishment, a store in a small town of Greenfield, Massachusetts. A week later after I got the box, I hesitated to work with the negatives. A lot of questions came to my mind – ethical questions such as ‘can I use these photographs as they are not mine?’ I also had emotional questions considering all the stories that were captured on those negatives. The first thing I wanted to do to connect with these negatives was to find Greenfield. I searched for Greenfield and found twenty-six Greenfields in the United States. It instantly changed my perception of these pictures as I thought that these negatives can belong to any town in the United States called Greenfield. Moving forward with the research and trying to understand a content of my findings, I started digitizing the negatives and the envelopes. As I uncovered the negatives, I noticed a lack of representation in the photographs.
“I wanted to understand the concept of the images, who was represented and who was not represented?”
I have noticed all the families in these pictures are white people and from what it looks like, they are middle-class. There is no trace of representation of African Americans or Native Americans, Asian, Latinos, or any other communities that are not white or Caucasian.
As I researched more about the suburbs in the United States, I came across this suburb named Levittown in New York State area. After looking through some documents, I found that one of the architects of the suburb area said that only people of Caucasian descent could move into the area and live there. This helped me to understand the lack of representation in the negatives that I found.
Based on that research, I decided that the photographs from Greenfield should be archived and considered a fictional archive. And why is that? Because my experience was so distant, and my background was also distant to the content on the images that I thought these images had a second chance to depict new stories.
“It is amazing how these images become fiction for me because I don’t know their history– they become just stories for me.”
Arty: That’s a very long process and a very big project. You’ve also mentioned a couple of projects where you traveled all over the world. ‘A place to disappear’, I’m very curios how you came to the subject and what were you feeling when you approach such title?
Pablo: A place to disappear comes as a project to develop landscape and our idea of disappearance in a broader sense. Something that has always been at the core of my practice even though the result might look completely different in terms of aesthetics is the idea of legacy and disappearance in relation to the physical space and understood as a landscape but also understood as the legacy of the subject. A place to disappear is a project that took me three years, the whole process of being in different places, shooting, understanding the whole process. My main goal was to visualize or create a utopic approach to landscape in the future.
“What will happen if we disappear from this planet? How are we going to feel in this primitive landscape?”
Arty: What is the process would you say with the projects that you develop? Is there a specific approach when you think of a project and you say, “I have to work on this, or I have to do this” in order to accomplish it? What is your thought process when it comes to your projects?
Pablo: I think my projects are rounded in strong research component always. There is a lot of research about the images I encounter or the themes about it. There is also time because as I said before I think time always works on my side to kind of understand and grasp more information about the content of the archives and the images that I want to work with. Definitely a lot of reading, writing, researching is really important for me in my artistic practice to have some sort of a side practice of writing. Not only my thoughts or ideas as I brainstorm but also trying to develop pieces of writing for myself most of the time to understand my thought process. That clarifies a lot of ideas for me and helps me to put inn context the images I work with, the materials or different sources.